Pandora's Temple

by Jon Land

  “Any sign of the captain?” McCracken shouted over the storm.

  Wareagle shook his head, his long black hair freed of its ponytail and pasted across his face. The Venture had seemingly broken apart on impact with the sea, the scattered pieces of it turned into potential weapons set in motion by the waves. Even if they managed to avoid that threat, the churning seas seemed destined to take them well before the Coast Guard could mount any rescue operation.

  Wareagle had grabbed a twisted, mangled husk of steel and drawn it between them to better support their weight and ride the waves as best they could. Then McCracken spotted something that looked like a glowing orb slicing through the waves and driving rain, coming straight for them.

  CHAPTER 34

  New Orleans

  Katie DeMarco awoke to the pungent sour scents of must and mold, aware almost immediately her captors had brought her to a basement. She snapped all the way upright, nearly falling off the stiff wooden chair on which she’d been placed, her arms and legs both unbound. Her clothes, wet with both rain and perspiration, stuck to the chair, and the basement air felt too thick and steamy to breathe.

  How much time did that mean had passed? Not enough for her clothes to dry was the only conclusion Katie could draw. Her head was cloudy, her vision slowly sharpening as the grogginess receded to the sight of several figures shrouded by the murky light before her. There was no pain until she moved her eyes, at which point the mere motion sent a cascade of light flashing before her to mirror the sudden burst of agony. Her head felt heavy, a bowling ball atop her neck, and the residue of whatever drug her captors had used to knock her out had left her mouth so bone dry, her tongue felt pasted to its roof.

  A single bulb dangled almost directly overhead, the only one she spotted in the dingy confines. None of the men around her moved, none spoke.

  “Who are you? Where am I?”

  Katie’s words echoed in her own ears, sounding as lame to her as they must have to her captors, when a smaller figure appeared amid the others, gliding through the shadows as if comfortable in their midst and stopping close enough to Katie’s chair for her to realize he was Japanese. His skin was porcelain smooth, seeming to shine even in the faint light. He smelled of musky talcum powder or, perhaps, lightly scented cologne. He looked at her, not seeming to blink, his eyes as detached and focused as a camera’s lens.

  “Katie DeMarco,” he said in thinly accented English. “What is your real name?”

  Katie remained silent.

  “There is no such person as Katie DeMarco. You are fortunate the company responsible for the Deepwater Venture did not check your credentials as closely as we did.”

  “Who’s we?” Katie heard herself ask.

  She thought she saw the Japanese man smile. “What do you know of the Venture’s true purpose, Katie DeMarco?” he asked, her name spoken in a lower tone with an edge of contempt.

  “It’s an oil rig. What do you think its purpose was?” she shot back, forcing contempt into her own voice as if that might have made her sound braver.

  “Was an oil rig. Now . . .” The Japanese man finished his comment with a shrug. “Tell me what you know, Katie DeMarco, the truth.”

  “I don’t know anything for sure.”

  The Japanese seemed to perk up a bit at that. “But you know something, don’t you?”

  “I know the crew was killed. I know the rig was destroyed,” she said, trying to figure out the Japanese man’s part in all this. He wasn’t part of Ocean Bore, meaning he had nothing to do with the men who’d pursued her through New Orleans, those who were behind Twist’s death or the murder of the WorldSafe team in Greenland. So who was he and what did he want exactly?

  “The crew was killed? You think that’s all that happened?” he snapped at her.

  “It’s enough,” Katie said, her mind still not totally clear.

  “If you have no answers for me, Katie DeMarco, you serve no purpose. Oil rigs drill for oil. There was no oil where the Venture was drilling. Ocean Bore was in search of something else entirely. I know this because I am in search of the very same thing, and I believe you know what it is and where the Venture found it.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “And yet you fled the rig at the most opportune time. You would expect me to believe that was just coincidence, that you didn’t have some idea of what was to come?”

  “I didn’t. That’s the truth.”

  “No. Since you fled the rig just before disaster struck,” the Japanese man continued, “I must assume you suspected what was about to happen. That means you know more about what I seek than you are saying.”

  “I’ve told you everything I know.”

  “You think me a fool, Katie DeMarco?” the Japanese man asked. “You think I don’t realize you infiltrated that rig for your own purpose? You think I don’t know you must have caught on to what the Venture was really up to?” He took another slight step forward. “And now you will tell me what you know about the Venture’s true mission.”

  “I don’t know how many different ways I can say it: I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  At that, the Japanese man edged yet closer to her, moving into the reach of the single dangling bulb. Even the dim light seemed to bother his eyes, making them narrow. He dabbed at them with a handkerchief as if they were watering, and Katie noticed his left hand was clothed in some kind of thin, black mitten.

  “My name is Shinzo Asahara, Katie DeMarco.”

  Katie tensed, her empty stomach quivering.

  “I see that name is familiar to you.”

  “Your father was Shoho Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo.”

  Asahara studied her briefly. “You know of him.”

  “I know he was a murderer, leader of fanatics.”

  Asahara stiffened. “You would be wise not to mock me.”

  “I’ve done nothing to you!”

  He grinned. “That’s better.”

  Katie eyed him questioningly.

  “There is fear in your voice now. That tells me you understand the depths of your plight. ‘Shinrikyo’ means ‘supreme truth,’ Katie DeMarco. And right now the only truth that matters is what the Venture uncovered holds the means for Aum Shinrikyo to fulfill its destiny.”

  “The end of the world,” Katie said as much to herself as Asahara.

  Aum Shinrikyo was a doomsday cult centered in Japan and founded in 1987 by Shinzo’s father, Shoho, the partially blind son of a tatami straw mat maker. He led an ordinary life until a journey to the Himalayas to study Buddhism and Hinduism left him a profoundly changed man, and he returned to Japan obsessed with the coming end of the world. More to the point, he had taken it as his God-given duty to see that end wrought by his own hand.

  In pursuit of that goal, he founded his Aum Shinrikyo cult to engage in a final fight leading up to Armageddon. Toward that end, Aum Shinrikyo established a number of chemical factories and stockpiled various chemicals in preparation for at least nine biological attacks on different installations in Japan. Targets had included the legislature, the imperial palace, and the US base at Yokosuka. Cult members sprayed microbes and germ toxins from rooftops and convoys of trucks.

  With one exception, though, all the attacks failed; and the one that succeeded led to what the world believed was the cult’s ultimate demise, once Shoho Asahara was arrested and tried for spreading sarin nerve gas in a Tokyo subway station in 1995. The gas killed thirteen passengers and injured over five thousand. But if his technicians had not made errors in preparation and dispersal of the gas, thousands of innocent subway patrons would have been killed and tens of thousands injured instead.

  Katie had thought the resulting trials and imprisonments of the cult members, including Shoho Asahara himself, had ended Aum Shinrikyo forever. But the fact that Asahara’s son was standing before her now clearly indicated otherwise.

  The end of the world, Katie thought again.

 
“I want the means to bring my father’s vision to fruition,” Shinzo Asahara told her, “the means that oil rig uncovered six miles beneath the surface of the sea. I want the very same thing you must have, and I want to know what you learned of it while on board.”

  “I can’t help you. I don’t know what it was that they uncovered, other than it wasn’t oil.”

  Asahara tilted his head slightly to the side and regarded her closer. “Then you’re going to die, Katie DeMarco, slowly and painfully unless you tell me what I need to know,” he said as the man nearest her chair eased a knife from inside his jacket.

  CHAPTER 35

  New Orleans

  The knife looked to Katie like a smaller version of the samurai sword one of her rescuers had wielded in the restaurant earlier that day. Clearly just as sharp and managing to shine even in the dingy basement’s meager light.

  “Not much of an incentive,” Katie managed, still eyeing the blade.

  Shinzo Asahara continued to regard her closely. “Who are you really, Katie DeMarco?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Only that you should be much more frightened than you are. Pleading with me, begging for your life.”

  “Maybe you’re just not as scary as you think you are.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Why are you wearing that mitten on your hand?”

  “Would you like to see?”

  “Why don’t you tell me if it has anything to do with your father and Aum Shinrikyo wanting to destroy the world? Is that your supreme truth?”

  “The world is already destroying itself, Katie DeMarco. My father was driven by his core beliefs, the enlightenment he encountered and passed on to me. I share those beliefs along with a desire to finish his work to spite the world that has martyred him. What the Venture uncovered can give me the means I need to finish the job.” Asahara held up his left hand, the one cloaked by the dark mitten. “You want to know why I wear this? To hide a souvenir left from the last time I encountered the very force you know full well that the Venture found.”

  “What force?”

  “Ignorance renders you useless to me. If you have nothing to tell me, our business is done and so is your life.”

  “So you’re a murderer just like your father, and you’ll die just like he did. I believe he was hanged.”

  Asahara’s expression flattened, his breathing steadied in resignation as he stepped closer into the thin spray of light, ignoring the pain it sent shooting through eyes he fought to keep open.

  “We have all made sacrifices for our beliefs,” he said, starting to tug at the tight mitten covering his left hand. “My father paid his price for his beliefs, just as I have paid mine. The difference is when I go, I will take the rest of the world with me. One final chance, Katie DeMarco, one final chance to aid me in that task.”

  Her mind cleared now, Katie used that final chance to lurch up out of her chair and close her hands on the basement’s single dangling lightbulb. Steeling herself against the pain, she compressed the bulb between her hands, shattering it and driving some of the thin shards into her palms as the basement was plunged into darkness.

  Men yelled, men shouted. Footsteps pounded the floor. Shinzo Asahara’s voice shouted orders in Japanese, and Katie felt shapes converging on her as hands flailed out, brushing against her clothes.

  But she’d already memorized the exact location of the stairs from her chair. Twenty-one steps by her estimation. Katie kept her pace steady and measured through the darkness, nothing to give away her position to men likely trained in the martial arts and thus accustomed to fighting in difficult conditions.

  Sounds of pursuit had begun to close upon her when her hand grasped a wooden railing and she rushed up the steps, bursting through a door into what looked like some kind of storage room. Another door marked Exit was just to her right and she surged through it into a back alley and the stormy night beyond.

  She felt the rain wash the blood from her hands, realizing only then how much they hurt. Katie burst into an all-out sprint to the nearest street. She sped across it and swung right immediately down another, safe from her pursuers for now and struck by a dread fear of the enormity of whatever the Venture had uncovered six miles below the surface.

  “. . . I will take the rest of the world with me . . .”

  Katie heard Shinzo Asahara’s words in her mind again, as she disappeared into the night.

  CHAPTER 36

  Northern Gulf Stream

  “What do you mean it’s gone?” Captain Merch said from the bridge of the Coast Guard cutter Nero, as they steamed toward the Deepwater Venture’s position.

  “We’ve finally got the satellite feeds back up, sir,” his exec told him. “I checked the positioning myself. Nothing. The Venture’s gone, lost to the sea.”

  Merch nonetheless raised the binoculars to his eyes, peering at the sun burning through the thick mist, the storm’s residue still clinging to the surface. As a result, the sea gave up nothing, and they were still a mile out from the rig’s coordinates.

  “No sign of anything?” Merch groped, letting the binoculars dangle again.

  The exec shook his head. “The Gulf got it all, sir, every last piece and bone.”

  “We’d best be sure. Keep us on course. Full power.”

  It was only last month that Merch had taken command of the Nero, part of a new generation of Sentinel class patrol boats that were easily the most advanced for their time of any the Coast Guard had enjoyed since being conceived by Alexander Hamilton around 1790.

  “Captain,” the exec barked suddenly, “sonar’s got a hit!”

  “Debris?”

  “No, sir, it’s moving. Straight, I say again, straight for our position.”

  “Sound the general alarm,” Merch ordered, not about to take any chances. “Go to battle stations.”

  The Nero sliced through the mist, riding effortlessly over the choppy seas. Since the storm was clearing from the west, visibility was already increasing and Merch caught the first hint of the sun’s dawn rays above. Then, just like that, the mist was gone and the chop with it, replaced by a frighteningly calm sea empty with the exception of an object coming straight for them from a thousand yards out now.

  “Captain, is that a—”

  “Yes,” Merch said, before the exec could finish, “I believe it is.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Northern Gulf Stream

  Hours before, amid the storm-swept darkness, McCracken had just been about to drop below the surface to avoid whatever hunk of rig debris was sweeping straight for them.

  “Wait, Blainey,” Wareagle said, halting him. “It’s the life pod.”

  He spoke just as the orb seemed to halt itself in the waves, a top hatch opening enough for Captain Seven to pop his upper body out.

  “Somebody call for a taxi?”

  They’d ridden out the rest of the storm within the life pod’s ample confines, using its small engine and controls to avoid the harshest swells as best they could and then following the course they expected the Coast Guard to take to the Venture’s former position as soon as the seas allowed. Those seas had ravaged Captain Seven’s computers, but all the most pertinent data had already been uploaded to the mainframe and he’d somehow managed to salvage the samples he’d taken from the Venture’s freshly reformed superstructure.

  “You’re something, Captain,” a soaked McCracken said, shoulders sheathed in a blanket.

  “You should see me when I’m stoned.”

  “I have, plenty of times. Remember?”

  Captain Seven’s eyes had gone down at that, his tone turning uncharacteristically somber. “Lots of people talk about that war now, but almost none of them have any idea what the fuck it was really like. Or about.”

  “Some days even I don’t remember what it was about. But I guess all wars are like that in one way or another.”

  Captain Seven sucked in a hefty breath, as if he were smoking from an imaginary b
owl, his twisted tangle of graying hair having dried into patches with the texture of steel wool. “I saw you at the Wall once,” he said suddenly, referring to the black carved granite shape of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. “Both of you.”

  “I know.”

  “You saw me, too?”

  McCracken nodded.

  “Should have come over. I was beyond stoned at the time. What was your excuse?”

  “Respect for privacy, yours as well as mine. Besides, I already had plenty of company, even if their names weren’t there,” said McCracken, turning toward Johnny Wareagle, whose gaze was locked out a small window facing back toward the last remnants of the Venture. “What’s eating you, Indian?”

  “I haven’t felt anything this powerful in a very long time, Blainey.”

  “With good reason, my friend,” said Captain Seven. “Because there isn’t anything more powerful than what took that rig down, not in this world anyway. It’s what I was looking for in the Mediterranean five years ago and may have found here. It could mince up and scramble the entire world the same way it did the Venture. Mix up the contents of the planet in the spin cycle and pour out whatever’s left. Forget a Level Six event, this is a genuine Level Six Thousand. Only one problem.”

  “What’s that?” McCracken asked him.

  “What’s responsible doesn’t exist.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Pyrenees Mountains, Spain

  “You’ve found it at last, Mr. Roy.”

  Pierce’s report had gone on to detail as much as was currently known about the inexplicable fate of the Deepwater Venture, updated hours later to include the fact that the rig had been lost to the sea.

  Disappointment over losing all chance to examine the rig and prove his theories conclusively had first stolen Sebastian Roy’s sleep and then left it racked by nightmares. He tossed and turned, a cold sweat covering his skin even in the oxygen-rich, normally comfortable chill of his bedroom.