“And yet there are some descendants who have made it.” She gritted her teeth. “When we find them, we’ll solve this puzzle, with or without the Death Stone to guide us.”
“The colony put you where you are today, and we can take it from you.”
“Don’t you dare threaten me. This is Washington D.C. You might have helped put me here, but I’ve made damned certain no one gets to throw me out. I made a mistake twenty years ago. But I’m sure as hell going to do my best to rectify it.”
“Then why did you even bother to bring me here today?”
She smiled, as though she was taking pleasure in his reaction. “Because I wanted to tell you in person that you’ve lost.”
“I’m sorry, but with the exception of many of my handpicked friends and specialists, the human race is about to become extinct.” His voice was charming in its perversity. “So, you must be somewhat more explicit when you tell me that I’ve lost.”
“You’re right. How very remiss of me. Although I’m not usually one to gloat, with you I’ll make an exception. I fired your puppet and my Deputy today. Sam Reilly discovered the Aleutian Portal, and your arms and drug trafficking system just became a whole lot harder.”
He turned to face her. A curious and wry expression on his lips, as though it weren’t particularly concerning for him. He had control over more than a dozen global enterprises, so the loss of the secret tunnel wasn’t going to faze him.
Botkin laughed. “I never really liked your Deputy anyway. Some people just aren’t worth the effort. You on the other hand. You the colony would be willing to make sacrifice for.”
He was egging her on.
“Oh, one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“When my people were combing the surveillance footage of the attack on the Big Diomede Island, you’d never guess whose face came up.”
“Go on.”
“Your golden-haired man, Ilya Yezhov.”
Botkin shrugged. “What about him?”
“I just thought I’d mention that every one of your men were killed inside the Aleutian Portal.”
She watched his face pale. Botkin was the king of the world right now. A leader and master in the shadows that few realized even existed. A puppet-master, who controlled the greatest leaders on the planet.
There had been predictions about a future where the world was governed by one system. A type of one-world leadership. What most people didn’t realize was that Leo Botkin had already formed that system, by putting his own people in positions of power in countries throughout the world. He had no desire to lose that power. But the colony would be different. There, money no longer mattered. Power had to be wrested from others through sheer might. Ilya Yezhov, she expected, was supposed to be that might. His most loyal servant, and most dangerous of men.
He turned to face her. “I believe we’re done, here. I promise you this is the last time you will ever see me.”
The Secretary watched him leave. Her eyes returning to the Jefferson Memorial. She had no doubt she’d see him in hell, sooner or later.
Chapter Seventy-One
On-board the Maria Helena – Anchorage, Alaska
Sam picked up his cell phone on the third ring.
“Hello, Mr. Reilly?” It was Douglas Capel, the astronomer who he’d left the Death Stone with.
“Yes, speaking.” Sam took a breath in and held it. “Mr. Capel, did you make any progress with the stone?”
“Yes. I found your asteroid.”
“Really? That was quick.” Sam swallowed. “What did you find?”
“I have some good news for you. The asteroid is going to get close, but no matter what model of trajectory I put into the simulator, the thing’s going to miss Earth. It’s a narrow gap, but a gap nonetheless.”
“Are you certain?”
“Yes, I’m certain. I’ve spent my life studying astronomy. I’ve led the knowledge base on the topic for nearly forty years. So yes, I’m damned certain of my math.”
“All right. Thank you so much for this good news.”
Capel said, “There’s one more thing you’re gonna want to know about.”
“Shoot.”
“We ran the stone through an MRI machine.”
“And?”
“There’s four secret chambers inside.”
“Are the chambers empty?”
“No.” Sam could hear the man sighing over the phone. “I didn’t want to open them until you’re here, but I have an image of each stone that was found inside – and given the suspected age of the Death Stone, it’s creepy as all shit.”
“Really. What’s the image?”
“There’s four separate images, actually.”
“Of what?”
“I won’t know for certain until the mortar has been cracked and the ancient stones removed.”
“But?”
“We used ground penetrating ultrasound, it appears to be the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Beneath which, there are letters of the Greek alphabet – Theta, Sigma, Phi, and Omega.”
“All right. Can you email me those images, please?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Thanks for everything.” Sam paused. “Just one more thing.”
“Go for it.”
“Can you tell me when the asteroid will come close to earth?”
“Not specifically. Only a rough date range.”
“And?”
“Soon.”
“How soon?” Sam persisted.
“Within our current calendar year.”
Sam swallowed. “Do you have any idea what sort of effect it might have on earth as it passes by?”
“Well, I’d have to speak with some of my colleagues, but depending on the size of the asteroid, its magnetic pull could wreak havoc.”
“How so?” Sam asked.
“Best case scenario, tides will become more volatile.” Capel clicked his lips as though he was trying to calculate the cost of a burger or something trivial. “Worst case though, the magnetic poles might rapidly and catastrophically flip. My goodness, if that were to happen, there would be massive subsequent shifts in earth’s tectonic plates. Volcanoes would erupt, the ocean’s thermohaline circulation would change direction, most likely resulting in an ice-age. Something like that, I doubt very much the human race would survive.”
Chapter Seventy-Two
Sam ended the phone call and immediately dialed another.
He spoke as soon as the phone was answered. “Billie. I need your help.”
“I’m doing fine, Sam, thanks for asking,” she said, speaking with the dedicated hard-ass bitchiness Sam had come to expect from his conversations with her over the years.
“What?”
“In case you forgot, I spent nearly two years drugged and enslaved to an ancient race. But I’m doing fine, despite not even getting a phone call since I was let out of the hospital.”
“I’ve been busy.” The excuse sounded weak, even to himself. “Besides, did you want to talk to me?”
“No, not really.” Billie asked directly, “What do you want Sam?”
“I’m going to forward you an image of something…”
“And?”
“I need you to tell me if you saw it in the pyramid inside the Amazon jungle.”
“Didn’t you hear? I can’t remember a thing from my experience in the Amazon.”
“I know. But the neurologist said there was a chance that certain things, important things, might still be buried somewhere deep in your subconscious.”
“Whatever. Just send the image.”
Sam added the image to his cell phone message, without any words, and clicked send.
A moment later, he heard Billie’s cell make the customary beeping sound associated with a new message. He heard her open the message.
And then she swore.
“What is it?” Sam asked.
“I have to go back.”
“Where?”
“To
the pyramid in the Amazon, of course!”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve seen that image before! It was at the pyramid. What’s more, I don’t think Elise was the only person responsible for getting me out of the jungle. I think it was them – the Master Builders – they wanted to release me.”
“Why?”
“So that I could come back and complete my part in the prophecy.”
Chapter Seventy-Three
Volcanic Dome, Inside the Aleutian Portal
Ilya Yezhov waited in complete darkness. He was lying down, trying to conserve his energy. His head rested on the now unusable railway track inside the great volcanic dome. A week ago, he’d nearly lost his life fighting three crazy men in a Hummer. He was pretty certain he killed one of them, while the other two got away, but not before first destroying his motorcycle.
His flashlight had become flooded and it had taken him an entire day to wade through the warm, shallow waters of the Cathedral Grotto, to reach the volcanic dome in total darkness. By the time he had, Botkin’s stupid old steam train had already left. Judging by the two dead guards he felt with his hands – both carrying old Soviet issued machine guns – he could only imagine that the two men in the Humvee had taken the train.
Confronted by the choice of waiting or attempting to walk over three thousand miles through the underground tunnel without food or water, he’d decided to wait. He was certain they would come for him.
Now, a week later, he regretted that decision. But what choice had he had? Even if he’d made the three-thousand-mile underground journey in the dark, then what? He would have climbed out of the Aleutian portal into the Colorado desert, still without food or water.
No. He’d made the only decision available to him.
The railway beneath his head vibrated. It was fine, but after a week in total darkness and seclusion the change was instantly noticeable.
He stood up. His eyes fixated on the darkness toward the east. There was still a possibility the distant vibrations originated from the return of the steam train. If that was the case, there was always the risk that on it would be a specialist force from the FBI or CIA’s drug and weapons trafficking department.
Turning to the west, his heart began to race. One way or another, his life was about to change. He had a fifty-fifty chance who was coming for him. If they came from the east, he was going to prison, if they came from the west, he was going to be king.
Nothing changed.
He placed his hand tentatively on the cold, hard, steel of the old railway track. The distant vibrations were gone. Had he imagined the entire thing? There was always that possibility, as he became more and more starved. Had his blood sugar fallen so dramatically he was now starting to hallucinate?
Turning around, he searched for answers. In the total darkness he switched from east to west and back again more times than he could remember. Now he had no idea whether he was facing east or west.
He gripped the handle of his Kalashnikov for comfort. Then, up ahead, in front of him – he spotted a light. At first just a faint glow, but gradually it became brighter.
The question was, which way was he now facing?
His finger rested firmly on the trigger and held his breath. The light increased and started to flicker in ripples. He expelled his breath in a silent wave of relief, as he watched the miniature submarine surface above the railway tracks. He moved closer to meet it.
The main hatch opened. A man looked at him, his eyes scrutinizing him, as though judging what could possibly make him so valuable to Leo Botkin.
“Ilya Yezhov?”
“Yes?”
“Climb in. It’s time. There’s a lot of work to be done.”
The End
Code to Extinction
Prologue
Oymyakon, Eastern Siberia – 20 Years Ago
They buried his mother under a bruised sunset of purple, red and ochre.
It had taken the better part of a week to dig the grave. A task made strenuous and painstakingly slow by the ground’s constant state of permafrost. Through a process of lighting a bonfire, letting it burn for hours and then shifting the coals to the side, they were able to dig, inch by inch into the soil until the hole was finally big enough to hold the crude hewn coffin. When it was all done, they all went inside his father’s log hut, and he was left all alone.
Ilya Yezhov stared at the raised mound of soil and snow where his mother now lay. It seemed like the pitiful evidence of a wretched life. His solemn blue-gray eyes, almost silver in the shade of the horizon, remained dry, but his throat felt the unfamiliar thickness of grief choking him. She was the only one who’d ever been kind to him and he would miss her. Oymyakon was a hard place to live, and his family had been dominated by hard men.
It was one of the coldest permanently inhabited locations on Earth.
Nestled into the bend of the Indigirka River, the village of Oymyakon translated to the words, non-freezing-water, in reference to a section of the river warmed by thermal pools where the fish spent the winter. Despite the local thermal pools, the village endured an extreme subarctic climate, competing with the town of Verkhoyansk for the title of coldest inhabited place on Earth. In 1933, the town recorded a temperature of minus ninety degrees Fahrenheit, the lowest officially recorded temperature in the Northern Hemisphere. Locked between the Verkhoyasnk Range in the north and the Stanovoy Range in the south – both peaking at nearly ten thousand feet – Oymyakon remained covered in snow all year round. In summer, days lasted twenty-one hours, and in winter, they were less than three.
Jobs were in short supply, with most of the five hundred odd villagers subsisting on reindeer-herding, hunting and ice-fishing for survival. Ilya’s father was an exception. He labored in a diamond mine in neighboring Yakutsk, staying there to work for up to two months at a time, before coming home for a week, as he had recently, to help bury their mother. Tomorrow morning, he would leave them again.
Besides the obvious issues of remoteness, the cold itself forced the village to be a simple place with few conveniences. Cars were hard to start with frozen axle grease and fuel tanks, unused pipes could freeze within five hours, and batteries lose life at an alarming speed. Block heaters were used when the vehicles were turned off to keep the engines from freezing permanently. Electronics, including GPS, fail at anything below minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit. Thick fur coats, and multiple layers were a must, even to step outside for a few minutes.
His eyes swept the snow-covered landscape. The Indigirka River ran in a gradually southeastern direction. Frozen solid, large chunks of ice nearly ten feet high met the edge of the river, where natural hot water springs warmed the water until it flowed at a trickle. White mountains rose nearly to an altitude of 3,600 feet on opposite sides of the river, causing cold air to pool in the valley below, with Oymyakon freezing at its center. A road of ice ran parallel to the river, and a thick forest of pine continued from the road to the bottom third of the mountains on either side of the river. The trees were twisted and dwarfed as their roots were unable to penetrate the permafrost. On the outside, the entire place looked wicked and cruel in its stark emptiness. A world God had forgotten.
But that was just an illusion.
In summer, the taiga forest, densely populated with stunted spruces, firs, pines and larch, provided a floor of grass, moss and lichen, where berries and mushrooms grew and reindeer flourished. In the nearby rivers, fish were plentiful. Below the inhospitable surface, the land was well endowed with raw materials. The soil contained large reserves of oil, gas, coal, diamonds, gold, silver, tin, tungsten and many other valuable gemstones. The nearby region of Sakha where his father worked produced ninety-nine percent of all Russian diamonds and over twenty-five percent of the diamonds mined in the world.
One day, he smiled, he would be rich – but first he would need to live that long.
At the age of twelve, with a diet of fish and reindeer, he was barely able to meet subsistence for nine mont
hs of the year. Ilya’s growth had been stunted. A fact worsened by his older brother, Demyan, who at the age of fourteen had already reached puberty and was well on his way to becoming a strong man like his father.
And like his father, Demyan was quick to enter a fight and even faster to end it. They were only two years apart, but Ilya had never won a battle. One day, he swore, he would catch up, and when that happened he would be the toughest man in Oymyakon – then he would teach his big brother a lesson he’d never forget.
“Ilya!” Demyan shouted. “Come inside before you freeze to death.”
He smiled. Until that day, he would answer to his brother. “Yes, Demyan.”
“Yes, Demyan.” Resolve burned in his hazel eyes. Until that day, he would answer to his brother.
Ilya glanced at the pitiful remains of his mother’s life and turned to go inside. He promised himself that his life wouldn’t end here, his body lying sadly buried in a pathetically shallow grave. No, he would make something of his life. He would be different. He would be a rich and powerful man, feared by everyone around him.
“Goodbye mother,” he murmured, then he turned and left.
*
It was late in the winter. The sun was starting to make its presence known on the edge of the horizon for short periods each day, after nearly four months of nearly permanent darkness. At three a.m. the sun was still far from rising.
Demyan Yezhov listened as his father prepared to leave the house in silence. They’d said their goodbyes last night. His father was due to return to the diamond mines in Yakutsk. It was dangerous work, but the money it provided made it worth it. Their risk of starvation without the income it provided was much greater than the chances of a mine disaster.
Through dark eyes – almost black with gold flakes, he watched his father leave.
It would be the last time he’d see him for the next month. Ever since he could remember, he’d been secretly waking so he could watch him walk out the door. It was somehow stranger this time around, now that his mother was gone. Demyan was head of the house – although that was a strong word for the small ten by ten-foot log hut they called their home – and now they were on their own.
The Sam Reilly Collection Volume 3 Page 50
