The Cradle of Life

by Dave Stern

  And the Orb, he knew, would tell him exactly how to find it.

  He nodded again and Holliday activated the scanning laser.

  The instrument would map every millimeter of the Orb’s surface in the minutest possible detail and record it into his computers. Then the analysis would take place.

  Reiss had recently purchased a handful of NEC Earth Simulators—the machines that had just taken the title of the planet’s fastest supercomputer away from the Crays—for just that purpose. He looked forward to putting them through their paces.

  Based on a sample he and Holliday had just completed, the doctor expected that deciphering the Orb should take the NECs approximately twenty-nine seconds. Give or take.

  And then the real fun could begin.

  Someone coughed behind him. A newcomer—Reiss had been so absorbed in his work he hadn’t heard anyone enter.

  He turned and saw O’Sullivan. Saw the look on the man’s face and felt the tranquility begin to leak out of him like air from a burst balloon.

  “She escaped.” Reiss felt a faint pounding just behind his temples. He reached into his pocket for an ibuprofen—specially modified, of course, to suit his body chemistry.

  Sean nodded. “She has no idea where we are.”

  Reiss swallowed the pill and shook his head.

  “We’ll take no chances.” He turned to Holliday. “Start transferring everything we need to manufacture an antidote to the jet.”

  She nodded and waved a white-coated assistant forward to monitor the scanning. Sean left the room to begin preparations of his own.

  Reiss stayed a moment longer, watching the laser’s progress on the computer display.

  Percent Surface Scanned Completed: .028

  Time to Scan Completion: 7:12:29

  Slightly under seven and a half hours until they had the Orb deciphered and were on their way. Reiss didn’t expect to see Croft pop up before then, but if she did, he would order an immediate evacuation.

  He planned to treat her like an infectious disease from this point forward. Or to put it more colloquially…

  He was going to avoid her like the plague.

  MI6 got a Chinese military transport to follow the copter. Someone high up was pulling strings—the plane (Lara and Terry met it at a base just outside Shanghai) had been reserved for their exclusive use. And not only were they the sole passengers, rations and sleeping hammocks had already been prepared for them.

  Lara skipped the food and took a hammock, exhausted. Before closing her eyes, she took a final look at the GPS readout, but it only confirmed her previous guess and the intelligence MI6 had given her when she’d called for help.

  The Orb was headed to Hong Kong. Intelligence had Reiss’s operation based there, though no one could confirm its exact whereabouts.

  We’ll be taking care of that little item tomorrow, Lara thought, and immediately fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  Daybreak found them at a Kowloon pier, waiting with a queue of early risers for the first hydrofoil across to Hong Kong.

  When they were allowed to board, Lara made for the bow of the boat, holding the GPS display in front of her as they walked. Absorbed in the task of trying to narrow down the Orb’s location, she didn’t notice Terry bringing her breakfast until she looked up and the tray was on the rail at her shoulder.

  “Eat,” he told her.

  “Thanks.” She gulped down her espresso and nibbled at a croissant, all the while concentrating on the readout. Hong Kong was roughly split into two distinct regions—the urban north side of the island, whose gleaming towers they were fast approaching, and the suburban south. Reiss’s headquarters were definitely in the north, probably the central district that was the heart of the island’s shopping and financial community, but that was all she could tell from the readout at this distance. Still, it was good news. Central started at the pier and went only a few blocks deep. With any luck, they’d have his exact location within the hour, and the Orb not long after that.

  “We did well back there, Croft,” Terry said.

  She glanced up to find him studying her intently, in a way that made her immediately uncomfortable. In a way that reminded her of other breakfast mornings they’d shared, in another life.

  “We did nothing,” she snapped. “Reiss has hours on us now. He may have already deciphered the Orb. He may be on his way to Pandora at this moment.”

  Terry frowned. “You said you had the key to reading the Orb. The medallion.”

  “I believe I have the key,” Lara corrected. “I haven’t established that yet.”

  An airhorn sounded. The hydrofoil was docking. Lara folded up the GPS, and hurried to join the crowd already gathering by the exit ramp.

  Minutes later, she and Terry were forcing their way through a crowded market plaza. They seemed to be swimming upstream, fighting through businessmen and women in freshly pressed suits, street vendors jockeying for sidewalk space, and knots of elegantly dressed shoppers seemingly intent on walking as slowly as possible. The air was thick and smelt heavily of diesel fuel—Lara found it hard to believe Reiss could find a quiet space to work in this madhouse, much less to build a laboratory.

  Terry’s thoughts seemed to be running parallel with hers.

  “Are you sure about this?” he asked.

  She checked the GPS again and nodded.

  “That way,” she said, pointing.

  The signal led them out of the marketplace at last, and into a more upscale commercial district. The sidewalks here were slightly less crowded, but the streets were lined with taxis and limousines, double and triple parked. Office towers loomed overhead, circling them on all sides.

  Terry stopped walking and shook his head. “A weapons lab in the middle of the city? No way. He dumped the crate.”

  Lara checked the GPS again. The signal had stopped flashing entirely, which meant…

  “It’s right here,” she announced. “The Orb.”

  “One of the buildings?”

  “No. It’s exactly where we’re standing.”

  “There’s nothing here.” Terry did a three-sixty, his eyes coming to rest on Lara. “It’s like I said. He dumped it—”

  “No he didn’t.” Lara was looking at the tall skyscraper right in front of them. Its facade was glass—beyond the entrance, she glimpsed an escalator leading up to the floors above. And another, leading down.

  “New Central Shopping Mall,” Terry said, reading off a banner that hung just above the building entrance. “Eight floors, eighty stores, International Food Court.”

  “Nothing about a biological warfare laboratory?”

  Terry smiled and shook his head. “Hardly.”

  “False advertising,” Lara said, snapping the GPS display shut.

  She jogged for the entrance, Terry right beside her.

  On sublevel four, she stopped and checked the display again.

  “Down,” she said, putting one foot forward, then stopped.

  There was a bank of payphones right beside the escalator.

  She’d been unable to reach the manor since Luoyang—since finding the medallion. And in case anything happened to her…

  Both Hillary and Bryce answered on the first ring.

  “Lara! Are you all right?”

  “Fine.” She heard the scrape of chairs pushing back from a table and realized she was on speakerphone. “Have you made any progress on reading the Orb?”

  “Not really.” That was Bryce, sounding guilty. Lara could hear a faint whirring noise in the background, which she recognized as the helicopter simulation. She hoped that wasn’t all he’d been doing in the day or so she’d been gone.

  “Well, I may have some help for you. I need you both to look at something.”

  She reached into her pack and pulled out the wireless digicam. She attached one end to her belt, tucked its lens over her ear, and turned it on.

  “Do you have this?”

  She waved a hand in front of the lens.
<
br />   “Hello to you, too,” Bryce said. “We’re live.”

  She lifted the medallion out from around her neck, held it up to the lens.

  “This was in the Luna Temple, close to the Orb. I’m betting it’s the key to reading the markings…”

  “Do that again, slower this time if you would,” Bryce said. “I’m recording.”

  She did as she was asked, showing him both sides of the medallion.

  “What’s that figure?” he asked as she ran the lens over the figure on the medallion’s obverse side.

  “The musician?” Lara frowned. “It could be Pan, I suppose, though the face isn’t exactly—”

  Bryce whispered something.

  “Say again?” Lara asked.

  “Music,” he said, his voice suddenly full of life. “Sound! Brilliant!”

  Lara thought she knew what he was driving at. “A tonal language?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe not a language at all. Maybe musical tones.”

  “A song?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe, maybe, maybe,” Lara said. “Find out.”

  “Will do,” he said.

  She said good-bye. Next to her, Terry was finishing a call of his own.

  He put a hand over the phone. “Escape route,” he mouthed to her, then returned to the call.

  “If that’s the only way, then set it up,” he finished, and set down the receiver—harder than necessary, Lara thought.

  “Problem?”

  He shook his head. “No, no—piece of cake. Escape Plan A in place.”

  “All right then.” She started for the escalator, taking out the GPS locator again. “Let’s go find the good doctor.”

  Fifteen

  Percent Surface Scanned Completed: .934

  Time to Scan Completion: 0:18:42

  Reiss studied the display and frowned, wishing he hadn’t taken the stimulant cocktail in a sleep-deprived state. It was affecting his judgment, making him paranoid. The closer the computer came to finishing its task, the more anxious he became.

  He expected to look up at any minute and see Lara Croft staring out at him from the clean room.

  Ridiculous. She was half a continent away.

  “The jet is ready.”

  He turned to see Sean standing in the doorway to the lab.

  “I’ll be there in a moment.” Reiss didn’t like leaving before the scan was finished, but the delay Chen Lo had caused by not delivering the Orb immediately had put them behind schedule. Duvalier had already called twice and the others would no doubt follow suit very shortly. He had calls to make, ruffled feathers to smooth, tasks best accomplished from his office aboard the Gulfstream.

  He motioned Sean forward.

  “Call me with the location of Pandora, as soon as you get it. Until then, make sure the Orb is never left unattended. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  Reiss left the room. Two of Sean’s men fell into step beside him.

  He stopped to check in with Holliday, regarding the delivery system they’d set up for Pandora. She had questions regarding containment of the virus once it had been disseminated.

  Reiss smiled and reassured the woman that containment would not be an issue.

  Still trailed by Sean’s men, he passed from the lab into the security room. A bank of video monitors lined one wall, tied in to cameras strategically placed throughout the lab and the mall beyond.

  Reiss’s laboratory occupied all of sublevel eight beneath the skyscraper. He’d personally supervised its construction, paying off the architect and his employees—in a manner of speaking—in a way that insured its existence remained secret. Research facilities, manufacturing equipment, living quarters for almost two dozen associates—the space had provided all the doctor could have asked for over the last decade.

  As this was more than likely the last time he would pass through its doors, Reiss took a final look around, courtesy of the monitors.

  A nod then, to the guard on duty, and the main entrance to the lab—a massive steel door—slid open.

  Reiss, followed by the two men Sean had assigned to accompany him, stepped through.

  “Sure?” Terry asked.

  “You keep asking that. And I keep telling you the same thing.” Lara snapped the GPS display shut. “The Orb is here. Right here, in fact.”

  They were on sublevel eight—the bottom level of the mall. According to the display, the transmitter was less than fifty feet away. Where, though…

  That was the question.

  There were no shoppers down here, no shops, either, just empty storefronts boarded over with plywood, painted with ads promising exciting new shops, coming soon. They’d passed an emergency exit to the parking garage, offices for a Korean real estate firm, a rest room with an Out of Order sign hung over it…

  They’d tried every door—all were locked.

  Lara was studying the ceiling, looking for an access panel when Terry grabbed her arm and pulled her behind a support column.

  “What—”

  “Shhh.” He put a finger behind his lips and pointed.

  Jonathan Reiss, followed by two of his guards, was walking directly toward them.

  “He came from there,” Terry whispered, nodding toward the real estate firm.

  “Think he’s buying real estate in Pyongyang?”

  “Hardly.”

  Reiss and his men walked past, on their way to the elevator banks. A car came and Reiss and one of his men stepped inside. Just as the doors were closing, a young boy burst out of nowhere, ran to the elevator, and stuck his hand in between the closing doors.

  The doors popped back open and the boy—followed by a harried-looking couple Lara took to be his parents—dodged inside the elevator.

  Lara caught a glimpse of a very annoyed-looking Reiss and then the doors shut again, this time for good.

  Lara’s attention was on the other security man.

  “Take him?” she asked Terry.

  “Take him,” he agreed, and as the guard walked back past, stepped out from behind the column.

  Terry’s knowledge of pressure points was truly amazing.

  Approximately twenty seconds later, Reiss’s man had supplied them with details of the lab’s security system.

  About a minute after that, Lara and Terry were inside, and their guide—as well as two guards who’d been manning the control center—lay unconscious at their feet.

  The guards all wore wireless headsets. Lara took one for herself and another for Terry, adjusting the frequencies so they could communicate directly.

  “Croft.” She looked up to see him standing next to a wall of video monitors. “We’ve got problems.”

  She joined him and quickly grasped what he meant.

  The monitors were apparently wired in to cameras scattered through Reiss’s lab. It was huge—and very well manned.

  “So much for easy…” Terry muttered.

  But Lara’s attention was elsewhere.

  She had found the Orb.

  Seeing it on one of the monitors, she heaved a sigh of relief. Watching Reiss leave before, she had feared he’d already finished with the Orb, and was on his way to Pandora. But there it was, in an isolation chamber of some sort—a clean room, perhaps—surrounded on all sides by floor-to-ceiling Plexiglas walls. Cradled in a pair of robotic hands some five feet off the ground, while a laser beam traveled slowly across its surface.

  There was a display of some sort next to it: Lara used the controls on the monitor to zoom in on the image.

  Percent Surface Scanned Completed: .939

  Time to Scan Completion: 0:17:06

  “I’ve got your back.” That was Terry, leaning in over her shoulder. “Go.”

  Lara nodded and ran.

  It took her a full minute to sneak past a secondary security post, four doors down the corridor.

  Another minute wasted hiding in the shadows outside the canteen, while white-coated technicians paraded by her.


  She doubled back, guided by instructions from Terry over her headset. Finally she found a side route that brought her to the main lab entrance.

  She paused there a moment, hidden in an alcove. Beyond a double glass door, three technicians in full hazmat suits were gathered around a centrifuge.

  Just past them, she caught a glimpse of the Orb.

  “No good.” Terry’s voice came over her headset. “There are two guards on the other side of the corridor and a good dozen technicians between you and the Orb, as well.”

  “Take me ’round another way.”

  “There is no other way. You’ve got to get everyone out.”

  “What do you suggest, the fire alarm?”

  The doors to the lab hissed open then and a technician walked out. Lara squeezed farther back into the alcove. It was a tight fit—behind her, a supply cart, lab instruments scattered on top of it, filled most of the available space.

  Lara grabbed a knife from the cart and crouched down, prepared to attack if she was spotted.

  She needn’t have worried—the technician walked past her hiding place without once lifting his eyes from the clipboard in his hands. Not his hands, actually—he was wearing thick rubber gloves. Full hazmat gear, as well.

  The entire lab, Lara realized with a start, was a hot zone.

  Hence the glass walls, with biohazard symbols pasted all over them.

  Lara looked up at those walls, down at the knife in her hand, and smiled.

  “Hang on a minute,” she whispered into the headset. “I’ve got an idea.”

  Seconds later, alarms were whooping throughout the complex.

  As he stepped out of the elevator, Reiss’s phone rang.

  Duvalier, no doubt, the doctor guessed, glancing at his watch. Or one of the others—he was all of ten minutes late with the update he’d promised them. Well, they’d be happy enough once they heard his report, heard that they were hours away from having Pandora in their possession.

  Suppressing a momentary flare of irritation, Reiss raised the receiver to his ear.

  “Yes?”

  But it wasn’t Duvalier.

  It wasn’t any of the five.