by David Wood
“Shortcut!” Jade shouted. Instead of trying to corkscrew her way down the rapidly disappearing passage, she launched herself out across the chasm, landing on the lower steps on the opposite side. Her momentum, along with the movement of the block upon which she landed, carried her into the wall, but she pushed off and jumped again, arcing across the ever-widening gap to the next level. Professor had evidently decided to trust her judgment; he too was caroming back and forth from one side of the spiral to the other, but as the blocks slid back into the wall, the distance across the chasm increased while the potential landing zones continued to diminish.
Jade saw the landing, what little was left of it anyway, ten feet below. The wedge-shaped blocks, which had caught her climbing rope during her initial fall, were in full retreat—less than six inches remained, and even if by some stroke of luck she managed to make the nearly twenty-foot leap and stick the landing, the blocks would be gone completely before she could reach the opening to the rotunda, so she decided to skip a step and go straight for her goal. She turned forty-five degrees to aim herself at the passage, then jumped straight up, planting her feet against the wall and pushed off like an Olympic swimmer making a turn.
Yet, even as she straightened her legs, propelling herself out into space, she knew in her heart that she was going to fall short of her target. The difference would be miniscule, just a few inches, but those inches would make all the difference. She would slam into the wall just below the entrance, and then fall once more into the cistern below.
The open passage taunted her with its nearness. She knew she would never be able to reach, but she stretched her arms out anyway. A thought flashed through her head. I might survive the fall if I don’t get knocked out hitting the wall.
Something moved, right above her. It was Professor, hurling himself across the gap, just as she had done. She felt his hand close around her arm and then….
The impact with the wall knocked the wind out of her. She thought she would fall then, but instead, there was a sharp pain in her shoulder as all her weight settled beneath the hyper-extended limb. Her mouth opened to issue an involuntary cry, but she had no breath to scream.
She hung there, pressed against the wall, hanging by one arm. Her immediate impulse was to claw her way back up the rock, but every time she tried to move, the pain in her shoulder spiked. If she didn’t relieve the pressure, her arm was going to be ripped from its socket.
She glanced up and saw the hand that had saved her, Professor’s hand, wrapped around her wrist. He lay flat in the opening to the passage, head and shoulders protruding, teeth clenched with the exertion of holding her.
He reached down with his free hand, and she reached up, stretching more than she would have believed possible, and somehow grasped his outstretched hand.
Suddenly she was moving again. The pain in her shoulder was nothing to the relief she felt as he lifted her to safety.
Her breath returned with a gasp and for nearly a full minute, all she could do was lie on the stone floor, enjoying the feel of something solid beneath her.
“Okay,” Professor said, at length. “We’re alive. I haven’t decided if that’s the good news or the bad news.”
“The good news,” Jade said, “is that we aren’t trapped.” She tried to sit up, winced at a fresh stab of pain in her shoulder.
“Don’t tell me you saw a back door? That would have been nice to know.”
“I didn’t know,” she retorted. “Not at first. But those Changelings that were waiting for us? They didn’t come in the front door. And I got a look around when we were separated.” She did not reveal that her look around had been mostly a virtual tour. “I know where to go.”
“Well, why didn’t you just say so?” He got to his feet then squatted beside her and began probing her shoulder. “Still attached,” he declared. “Just a muscle strain. We’ll get you some SEAL candy—you mere mortals would call it Motrin—and you’ll be ready for the Olympic gymnastics team in no time.”
She laughed despite herself. “That’s good to know, because this archaeology thing is wrecking me.”
He helped her to her feet and then gestured for her to lead the way. She backtracked into the rotunda, and soon happened upon a pair of bodies—Kellogg and the man Jade had called Not-Professor.
“I wonder who they really were,” she murmured. “You think the real Jordan Kellogg is in a landfill somewhere?”
Professor’s eye twitched. “If he’s lucky.”
His tone was enough to keep her from asking him to elaborate. She knelt to retrieve his fedora and placed it on his head. “There you go. Back in business.”
That was enough to bring a sparkle of humor back to his eyes. He retrieved his watch from the dead imposter, and then riffled through man’s pockets, reacquiring his passport, wallet and phone. “Now I’m back in business.”
“Want to see what he really looks like?”
“Nope. I just want to find that back door and get the hell out of here.”
Jade shone her light down the passage and moved toward the stairwell she had used to reach this level of the vault from the chamber where she had received her vision. The stairs did not ascend any further, but there was another opening on the inside wall of the rotunda, a passage that led to the chamber Jade thought of as “the interface.”
She pointed to it. “We have to go through there. But I should warn you, you’re going to see some things.”
“Yeah? Like Biblical stuff?”
Jade shook her head. “It doesn’t work like that. What you see kind of depends on what you take in with you.”
He narrowed his gaze at her. “How do you know that?’
“That’s how they built it.”
“They?”
“The aliens,” Jade said, feeling inexplicably foolish. “The grays. The extraterrestrial astronauts that Stillman was always going on about.”
“You saw them?”
“Yes. And I also found a bunch of their skulls.”
He nodded slowly.
“Don’t patronize me,” Jade snapped.
Professor raised his hands. “Sorry. Actually, I’m a little curious to see what this thing will show me.”
Jade gave him a hard look, but his skepticism was already undermining her own certitude. What if everything she had seen was just the product of her own preconceptions? Was her vision of alien engineers any more reliable than the angels or devils that Shah and all the self-styled prophets before him had seen?
But in the Hypogeum, I saw this place. That wasn’t a lie.
A tremor rippled through the floor and Jade felt a subtle change in the air pressure. Professor raised his head sharply, turning to look back down the passage. A moment later, a loud thump reached her ears.
“What the hell was that?” Jade asked.
He turned back to her, his expression now full of urgency. “That was an explosion. Shah’s terrorist friends just blew the entrance.”
Another violent shudder shook the passage, accompanied by a noise as loud as a gunshot, and Jade was thrown to the floor. Jagged cracks, like lightning bolts, appeared on the walls and ceilings, vomiting out a miasma of dust. Professor managed to stay on his feet. He seized Jade’s arm, triggering a nauseating wave of pain in her injured shoulder, but she fought through it, got up and staggered through the doorway.
The floor heaved and then began to tilt crazily, like the deck of a ship climbing the face of a rogue wave. Pieces of stone and concrete tumbled down around them. Jade threw her good arm up as a shield and plunged forward as the vault began coming apart all around them.
The Interface looked nothing like her vision of it now. Although the initial blast yield had been relatively small, it had thrown a monkey wrench into the precisely engineered machinery of the vault. The infrasound amplifier had become nothing more than a roiling tangle of jagged stone, slumping down through the center of the cylindrical tower.
“There!” Professor’s shout was barely a
udible in the tumult of grinding rock, but Jade heard and followed his pointing finger to their salvation, a rope ladder hanging down in the center of the chamber and rising up into the gloom overhead.
It seemed impossibly far away.
“We’ll never—”
Professor let go of her arm and scooped her off her feet. Before she could protest, he heaved her out over the center of the stone vortex. Something—the rope!—slapped against her face and she threw her arms around it, hugging the woven fibers even as she started to fall. The friction burned her face and chest, but she squeezed tighter and managed to slip her arms between the rungs.
The rope jerked taut with a bone-shaking abruptness and then she was hanging again, dangling above the swirling whirlpool of debris.
The ladder shuddered again, as if trying to shake her loose, and she saw Professor above her.
“Climb!” he shouted, and then he was moving, scrambling up the rungs.
Jade kept hugging the ladder to her, certain that if she let go, even to get a better hold, she would lose her grip and fall into the meat grinder below. She tried to find the rungs with her feet, but felt only empty space.
Another thunderclap shook the mountain, and what little remained of the interface and the surrounding tower dropped away. For a fleeting instant, Jade saw the vast cavity inside Bell Rock—the towers and aqueducts and air channels crumbling like an elaborate house of cards.
Then the shockwave hit. The Vault breathed its last, a blast of heat that buffeted Jade, propelling her up even as it engulfed her in a cloud of scalding steam….
And then it was over.
She lay beneath a sky full of stars. The smell of crushed earth was still in her nostrils, but the air was clear.
Professor lay beside her, and between them was a heap of rope, the ladder that Jade was still clutching. Professor had made it to the top and then hauled up the ladder—and her—like a fisherman dragging in his net. He had saved her.
She made a mental note to thank him.
To her left, a narrow fissure marked the Changeling’s secret entrance to the vault, or rather to the cavern where the vault had once stood. She did not need to look into it to know that the vault and all the answers it might have held—secrets or illusions—were gone forever.
Maybe it was better that way.
EPILOGUE-REVELATION
Sedona, Arizona—Two days later
The call came just after noon.
Jade had been lounging poolside, an activity, or more accurately a lack of activity that under normal circumstances, she would have found unbearably tedious. After the events of the past week however, lying out in the open with nothing buy sky above her, was just what the doctor ordered, literally as well as figuratively. The urgent care provider she’d seen the morning after her “climbing accident” had prescribed a regimen of rest and relaxation, along with ice, physical therapy and some heavy duty painkillers. She wasn’t keen on the ice treatments, but she was developing a new appreciation for sunbathing
The spa resort where they had booked a suite was just a thirty minute drive from Bell Rock and the hidden ruins beneath. They had not gone back to the site, which had been closed by the Forest Service due to “seismic instability,” and at last report, it would be several weeks before the popular tourist destination was open for business again.
Jade wondered if it would still be as much of a draw now that the source of all the paranormal activity associated with the place had been destroyed. She supposed it would. Stories of the Bell Rock Vortex, coupled with the human capacity to believe the unbelievable, would sustain the phenomena long after Jade was gone from the earth.
She had just returned to the room when Professor’s phone rang. He muted the television, which was tuned to a cable news channel, and answered. “Hey, Tam.” He glanced at Jade and then said, “I’m going to put you on speaker.”
“Jade?” Tamara Broderick’s strong voice crackled from the device, but Jade couldn’t tell if her tone was one of disapproval or awe. “You do have a knack for kicking the hornets’ nest, girl.”
Jade settled onto the couch beside Professor. “Hey, if it wasn’t for me you’d have no idea the hornets were even there.”
“Simmer down. It’s a mess, but I’m not unappreciative. The problem is figuring out who I can trust with this. God da—” She stopped herself. Tam had a smoker’s relationship with profanity—she was always trying to quit. “Frigging shapeshifters.”
“Changelings,” Jade corrected.
“They aren’t able to change shape,” Professor said. “It’s all just theatrical makeup and method acting.”
“I’m not stupid,” Tam shot back. “I know what they are. That little package you sent us is the gift that keeps on giving.”
It took Jade a moment to realize Tam was referring to Eve, the Changeling prisoner Professor had captured in Tasmania.
Tam was still talking. “We’ve got a list of probable infiltrators that includes at least two members of the President’s cabinet. That’s just in our country.”
“Well that explains your good mood,” Jade remarked.
“When does the roll-up start?” Professor asked.
“There’s not going to be a roll-up,” Tam said, wearily. “If we started arresting senior political figures and pulling their masks off, the world would come apart at the seams.”
“You can’t just leave them out there.”
“Actually, we can.” She paused as if trying to figure out how to deliver an unpleasant message. “There’s going to be a negotiated phase-out.”
Jade exchanged a worried glance with Professor, but neither of them interrupted Tam’s explanation.
Tam explained that, in order to keep the secret of the Changeling conspiracy a secret, the infiltrators would be given the opportunity to voluntarily relinquish their positions of authority in exchange for a promise of amnesty and resettlement in the witness protection program.
“How do you know they’ll go for it?” Professor asked.
“Why wouldn’t they? They can’t hide anymore, and you’ve utterly dismantled their raison d’etre.” She paused a beat. “You have, right?”
“The Vault was completely destroyed,” Jade said, letting Tam draw her own conclusions.
“These people are dangerous,” Professor intoned. “They’ve held power for a long time. They aren’t going to just roll over and give it all up.”
“We had all better pray they do,” was Tam’s grave reply.
Jade wondered if it really mattered. Despite Roche’s conspiracy theories, it seemed unlikely that the Changelings had ever wielded absolute control over the world’s governments and economy. She wasn’t sure that was even possible. In any case, if the Changelings were removed from power, someone just as unscrupulous would probably take their place.
Power corrupts and nature abhors a vacuum, Jade thought.
Tam was speaking again. “Do have any insights into what made the thing tick?”
“Infrasound frequencies can be used to induce a dream-like state,” Professor said, authoritatively. “People in that state see what they expect to see.”
“That doesn’t explain how Jade knew the vault would be in Arizona.”
Professor had no ready answer for that.
“It’s not the first time we’ve found something we can’t explain,” Jade said with a shrug. She had no inclination to speculate further. “What about Shah?”
“Latest intel puts him in Tehran. He’s gone back home.”
“So we can’t get to him?”
“Bigger fish to fry,” Tam said. “He was never much of a threat, and from what you’ve told me, he has reason to hate the Changelings even more than we do. Whether he meant to or not, he did us all a huge favor by destroying the vault.”
“Not sure how I feel about him,” Jade said, thinking aloud. “I don’t think he even knew whose side he was on.”
“Maybe we’ll run into him someday,” Professor said. “A
nd you can ask him.”
Jade shrugged. “Or not. I’m just glad it’s all over.”
When Professor did not respond, she looked over and saw him staring at the television. On the screen, a graphic banner announcing “Breaking News” was flashing over stock footage of naval vessels on the ocean. The crawl beneath the picture said, “Possible debris from Flight 815 found.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess it is.”
Tehran, Iran
But for the mountains towering behind the city skyline and the signs on the shops—Farsi written in the elegant Nasta’liq script—Atash Shah might have believed he was back on Park Avenue. The affluent Zafaraniyeh neighborhood in northern Tehran was every bit as modern, and almost as cosmopolitan, as Manhattan. It even had a synagogue, which probably would have astonished most Westerners.
It had been a long time since Shah called this place home, but there was nowhere else to go.
He recalled a line from an old poem. Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in.
The reunion with his family, and particularly his father who had never approved of his son’s travels—both literal and philosophical—had been a little strained, and Shah sensed there would be many more tense conversations in the days to come, but for the moment, things appeared calm.
Deceptively so.
His entire world had foundered. He was in exile. Everything he owned was gone, his possessions abandoned along with his New York apartment. He did not know if the authorities in the United States would seize his assets or pursue criminal charges against him, and it seemed prudent not to find out. He still had a controlling interest in the Crescent Defense League, though whether it could or even should continue remained in doubt.
After what he had learned under Bell Rock, he wasn’t sure of anything.
The dream of a second Golden Age of Islam—an era of spiritual and secular prosperity, an end to the destructive schism between Sunni and Shiite—was dead for him. He believed it was possible, probably even inevitable, but he would have no part in bringing that dream to fruition. He would never be the promised Mahdi.
