The Sam Reilly Collection Volume 3

by Christopher Cartwright

  “Did they reveal the location of the colony?” Sam asked.

  “Not yet. They’re being interrogated right now, but they won’t say.”

  “No one can hold out indefinitely,” Sam persisted.

  “They can if they don’t know anything. They would have told me the truth if they had known it. You have to remember, these people know the world is ending, and right now they’re about to be on the wrong side of an ancient bunker when it does.”

  “So they’ll talk?”

  “If they knew anything they would. Apparently, they were supposed to fly into Moscow where a private jet would take them to the colony.”

  “Had any of them been there before?”

  “Yes.” She sighed, heavily. “But that didn’t help much. They didn’t have maps or anything to tell where they had been flown.”

  Sam persisted. “What did they know?”

  “The colony was four hours away from Moscow by jet. The ground near the colony was always frozen. There was a lake. From the sky, the lake was shaped like a big boot. In the middle of the lake was an island and what looked like the cooling tower of a nuclear power station. But other members of the party have since rejected this statement, saying that the colony was powered by an enormous geothermic generator.”

  “So we’re looking for a Russian lake, shaped like a boot and a geothermic cooling tower?” he asked.

  “Beneath which, an enormous volcanic cavern provides an ancient bunker,” she added.

  “I take it no one’s located such a place by entering those details into the Geographic Information System?”

  “No. We’ve tried. It didn’t work. There’s nothing even close to those descriptions that use geothermic power.”

  Sam said, “It sounds like it might be the opposite end of the Aleutian Portal.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” the Secretary of Defense replied.

  “But it would take at least four days to reach and cross the Aleutian Portal.” Sam glanced out the window. It was almost permanently dark now, despite being the middle of the day. “And we don’t have four days.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “Keep working on it. We’ll head toward Moscow in the meantime. I know someone who might be able to help.”

  Sam hung up and called a second number.

  Demyan Yezhov picked up on the first ring. “Sam Reilly! If this strange darkness that’s shrouding the world is anything to go by, it appears you haven’t found what you were after yet.”

  “We found it, but someone took it from us.”

  “Really? That’s bad luck.”

  Sam didn’t have time for the chat. “Listen. I need your help. It’s going to take some time to explain why I need this, and I don’t have that time, but I need your expertise as a geologist who grew up in Siberia.”

  “Go on.”

  “This is what we know. There’s a colony inside an ancient volcanic cave. It’s roughly four hours by jet from Moscow. The ground near the colony was always frozen. There was a lake. From the sky, the lake was shaped like a big boot. In the middle of the lake was an island and what looked like the cooling tower of a geothermic generator.”

  “Okay, what do you need?” Demyan asked.

  “I need to find the colony. I need a list of known geothermic springs throughout Russia that would be powerful enough to support a population of five thousand people. Also, if you could narrow down any place where large volcanic caves are known to form.”

  There was only silence on the phone and for a moment Sam thought he’d been cut off. “Are you still there, Demyan?”

  Demyan expelled a large breath of air. “I can do better for that. I can tell you where it is and how to get inside.”

  “How?”

  “Because that’s Oymyakon where I was born, where I lost my entire family, and where I’ve spent my life vowing I would never return.”

  “But you’ll guide us where we need to go?” Sam held his breath.

  “To save the human race?” Demyan said. “I’ll go to hell and back.”

  Sam unclipped his seatbelt, walked up to the cockpit and said to the pilots, “Change of plan. We’re going to Big Island, Hawaii to pick up someone and then we’re off to Russia.”

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Elise followed the monk as he negotiated the undulating terrain, heading north toward Pidurangala Rock. Monkeys played in the thick foliage of the jungle overhead. They crossed over a series of aqueducts and then, joining a path of stones, began their climb up to Pidurangala Rock.

  “Do you know much about the history of my people?” the monk asked.

  Elise shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m sure its fascinating, but I hadn’t even heard of Sigiriya until a couple of days ago. I believe you’re Buddhist monks?”

  “Yes.” He nodded politely. “It’s okay. We know a lot about you.”

  “Why is that?” she asked.

  “It is not something we can explain. It does not make sense.”

  “But you must be able to tell me something?”

  “No. Telling will not do. We must show you. Sometimes only our eyes will accept what our heart knows to be true.”

  “You think I need to see the physical proof to accept the spiritual?” she asked.

  “That is exactly what I mean. Come, we are not far, now.”

  Elise found herself working hard to keep up with the old monk. “Tell me about your people. How long have you been here?”

  “The monastery dates back to the arrival of King Kassapa.”

  “Your people followed the migration of the king?”

  He shook his head and smiled. It was warm and ingratiating. “For many centuries, the monks lived at Sigiriya. When the king commenced construction of the citadel of Sigiriya, the monks were relocated to make room for the king’s palace. To make amends, Kassapa constructed new dwellings and a temple here to recompense them.

  “You were kicked out of your own place of worship?”

  “Yes. But that did not matter. Our purpose was not obstructed.”

  Elise waited for him to elaborate, but instead he remained silent. She felt her calves ache and her thighs burn as she climbed more than a thousand stone steps leading up a steep hillside behind the Pidurangala to a terrace just below the summit of the rock. The monk pointed out the Royal Cave Temple itself as they walked by. Despite the name, there was little to see apart from a long reclining Buddha under a large rock overhang. The statue was accompanied by figures, which the monk pointed out, were of Vishnu and Saman and decorated with very faded murals.

  The monk led her down the next terrace and stopped, where an old brick Dagoba – the Sinhalese name for the Buddhist stupa – stood proudly.

  Elise waited for the monk to tell her about it, but instead the man remained silent. She ran her eyes across the ancient building. The dark clouds had fully set in on the world and it was getting harder to see much of anything, but she could still make out the shapes of the ancient ruin. She’d read briefly about them previously, but had never been inside one. It was basically a mound-like structure with buried relics, used by Buddhist monks to meditate. This one would be considered quite modest, approximately thirty feet high at most.

  The construction of Dagobas were considered acts of great merit. Their purpose being to enshrine relics of Buddha. The entrances were designed to be laid out so that the center lines pointed directly toward the relic chamber. Although little of the cover still remained, the guidebook she’d read on the flight, said that the outer layer was normally coated with lime plaster, white of egg, coconut water, plant resin, drying oil, glues and saliva of white ants.

  “Well?” the monk asked.

  Elise reciprocated the monk’s monosyllabic response. “Well.”

  The monk smiled. It was old and well-practiced, with large creases gave evidence of years of the muscles of his face holding just such a pose. “Would you like to see where you come from?”

  Elise smiled
. It was more patronizing than she meant it to be. “You think I came from in here?”

  The monk wasn’t offended, or if he was, he certainly didn’t show it. His eyes were wide, as though many generations of waiting were finally up. “Let’s go inside and see. Like I said, some things, one must see to accept.”

  “It’s getting dark.”

  “Good. That will help,” the monk replied, mysteriously.

  Elise followed the monk inside. She didn’t believe for a minute that the monk was right and she had come from this region, but then, no one had ever been able to tell her where she had come from. She felt her stomach churn with a strange anticipation. All children, no matter what age they are, want to discover that they came from somewhere and belong to something.

  As an orphan, she had grown up in Washington, D.C. When she was eleven years old she won a cryptic mathematics test. It has been surreptitiously added to all public and private schools standard end of year exams for that year. It had been a test, set by the CIA, in search of child prodigies, mathematically geniuses, people with a certain type of analytical mind who could be groomed into perfect code-breakers for the next generation – where the internet was the front-line of some of the greatest intelligence wars ever fought.

  The CIA became her family. In her early twenties, that family had betrayed her, and after setting up a digital trail for a new identity, she disappeared. Since then she’d been working with Sam Reilly, who recognized her unique skill set. The crew of the Maria Helena were her new family and she was happy. Eight weeks ago, in the Amazon jungle, some truths she had often wondered about, came to surface, and she knew what she’d always known – she was genetically different. She had purple eyes, inhuman reflexes, and shared an active posterior lobe in her cerebellum that was dormant in others, and was capable of receiving high frequency radio waves in the form of images.

  Sam Reilly had informed her that the Secretary of Defense said that she was found as a baby, inside an ancient temple discovered in the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan. The temple revealed the first existence of the ancient race of Master Builders. Many questions had haunted her since that day. Who were her parents and where were they? She recalled the most disturbing question being the one the Secretary of Defense had asked Sam.

  The Master Builders plan everything precisely. If they intentionally left Elise to be found by the elite specialist military team I sent to examine the temple, it begs the question, why? More importantly, if there is a war with Master Builders, what side of it will Elise be on?

  With her heart in her mouth, she prayed that the answer to the question wasn’t written inside the temple. She followed the monk up the stairs and inside the main domed section of the Dagoba. It was dark inside and she struggled to follow the monk who appeared to walk with the familiarity of the blind.

  She switched on her pen-flashlight and used its dim light to follow the monk into a deeper chamber, where the ancient relics of Buddha were theoretically stored. The path descended more than thirty flights of stairs, before opening into a small domed chamber.

  Elise flicked the beam of her flashlight across the dome-shaped ceiling. It was made with a foundation of bricks, the same as the main outer dome. There were no frescoes or murals and not even any references to Buddha.

  Her eyes darted toward the monk, who was grinning peacefully. “What is it you expect me to see here?”

  “You will need to turn off the light if you want to see it.”

  Elise stared at him. Beneath his shaved head he was still smiling. He wore an orange kashaya robe wrapped around under the right arm and back over the left shoulder. There were not a lot of places for him to conceal a weapon, but it was possible. For a moment she had to swallow the fear that rose in her throat like bile. Could she have misjudged him? Was it all a ruse? Had he taken her here to hurt her? It seemed unlikely, but so was the thought that the truth about her past was written on the walls of the dilapidating monument to Buddha.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Only you can answer that. I can only take you here. If you want to go further, you will need to open your heart.”

  Conflict twisted her face into a grimace of indecision. It was unlike her, but these were unlikely times. Elise took a deep breath in, took a leap of faith, and switched off her flashlight.

  The darkness enveloped the room instantly

  She glanced above and expelled the breath audibly, certain she’d made the right decision. A series of bricks glowed with purple fluorescence. There were eight in total and when you drew an imaginary line between them, they formed the Greek letter Phi. Her eyes darted to the base, where a large stone depicted a horse in the same purple glow.

  Elise recalled Tom and Genevieve’s description of the hypogeum in the Orvieto Underground. They had used a black light wand to reveal the hidden keys of phosphorescent markings, leading to the queen’s sarcophagus.

  “I don’t understand,” she said to the monk. “We don’t have a black light, so why do the markings phosphoresce?”

  She couldn’t see the monk, but she could hear him laugh. “Markings? I see no markings.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. The final chamber is only to be revealed to you.”

  “I can see ultraviolet light?”

  The monk was still laughing. “How would I know what you can see?”

  Elise thought about it. Reindeer relied on ultraviolet light to spot lichens that they could eat. Some scorpions released a purple ultraviolet glow to distinguish between their family and predators. Butterflies are able to see and emit ultraviolet light as a hidden means of communicating with other butterflies. To this effect, many flowers have evolved to display ultraviolet patterns that help butterflies directly land on their nectaries, resulting in pollination of the flower. And now, she too, had been given the gift of vision within the ultraviolet spectrum.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Do you want to find out more, or have you had enough of the truth?”

  “I want answers.”

  “Good. Then only you can lead the way.”

  Elise stared at the ultraviolet markers in the brickwork above. She felt the first brick. It had a little movement. It could be potentially put down to age and dilapidation, but she knew better. She pressed it hard, and the brick appeared to move inward. She repeated the process on the other seven glowing bricks. She then gently put her weight on the glowing horse on the floor.

  She grinned.

  And the stone on which the horse had been secretly painted now moved down and forward – revealing a set of hidden stairs, leading deeper into the Dagoba.

  Chapter Sixty

  Ese-Khayya, Siberia

  The Russian built Ka-32A11BC helicopter seemed unnatural to Sam as it whirred its way across the eastern Siberian landscape. With its dual rotor blades that spun in alternative directions, negating the need for a tail rotor to counteract the torque generated by the single blade on a traditional helicopter, the helicopter appeared more like the shape of a strange toy than a functional aircraft. The helicopter had been chartered at the last minute with great expense. In addition to the two pilots, on board were Sam, Tom, Genevieve, Billie and Demyan.

  The Gulfstream G650 had been left in Zhigansk Airport, roughly three hundred miles to the west, where it was being refueled. If their mission was a success, the jet would need to be ready to race back to Sigiriya with the final sacred stone. Sam looked at the dark clouds that seemed to encapsulate every end of the world, slowly suffocating the light. He made a silent prayer that there was still time.

  He glanced across at Demyan. “You’re sure you dad still has the blueprints for the tunnels?”

  “Certain,” Demyan replied, but his grimace appeared less than certain.

  “But what?”

  “My dad has some cognitive impairment. It might be difficult trying to find them.”

  “He has dementia?” Sam asked.

  “No. Profound guilt.”

 
; “What?”

  “When I was still a kid my mother died. A week later, my father took a new job working for Leo Botkin, to put in place a secret tunnel to an enormous underground cavern. At the time, he thought he was doing the right thing. He was trading his own happiness for the survival of my brother and I. When the project was nearing completion, Botkin betrayed my father by trying to kill him and all his men in order to maintain the secret of the tunnels.”

  “How did he escape?”

  “My father climbed out through a ventilation shaft. Then, when he came home to find out what became of my brother and I, we were both gone and one of our neighbors told my father that my brother and I drowned in Boot Lake.”

  “Under which the colony exists?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Why did your neighbors think you were dead?” Sam asked.

  “My brother did drown in Boot Lake.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, me too. He was an angry kid and we never really got along, but after my mother died I was determined to be a better brother to him.”

  “It must have been hard.”

  “You have no idea. When I got home Leo Botkin was there. He told me my father had died in a mining accident and gave me the Russian equivalent of a hundred thousand US dollars at the time, for compensation. I knew the story was all crap and that Botkin was lying to me, but what could I do?”

  “What did you do?” Sam asked.

  “I took the money and fled to Moscow. I hid most of the money, but spent enough to get an education. As it turned out, I had a strong ability in mathematics and the sciences. I studied geology and that led to my interest in volcanoes.”

  Sam smiled at the revelation. “Why did you study geology of all things?”

  “Because I was angry at Botkin. I was certain he’d lied to me about how my father had died, and that the money was his way of offloading some guilt – although at the time I had no idea about what.”

  “So, you studied geology?”