Rafe leaned close enough to bring his nose to the screen. He pressed to activate Bern’s radio. “Get up!” he repeated.
He didn’t so much care if Bern captured the shooter. He just wanted to see what was happening. He leaned back, a tight grin on his face. All of this was quite exciting.
11:40 P.M.
Painter sprinted down the hall. It was a straight run to reach the laboratory at the back of the facility. Ahead, a set of double doors creaked open. He spotted Kowalski spying out, his pistol pointing down the hall toward Painter. He must have heard the gunfire.
Painter yelled, “Get everyone back! Into cover!”
Obeying, Kowalski retreated, but not before he kicked the door wide, opening the way for Painter’s headlong flight.
Every second counted.
As he ran, Painter pulled back the shotgun’s pump, ejecting the spent cartridge. Cradling the Mossberg under an arm, he freed the jury-rigged shell from his pocket and fumbled it into the empty chamber. Once this was done, he slid the pump forward, pushing the block and firing pin into position.
He would have only one shot.
As he reached the lab door, the crack of a pistol sounded behind him. He felt a burning slice across his upper arm as a bullet grazed him. Glancing back, he saw the downed commando, limbs still twitching, haul himself around the corner. The pistol, wavering in his grip, fired again, but missed.
Painter grimly admitted the truth to himself: That’s one tough bastard.
Reaching the lab, he dove inside and pulled the door shut behind him. Seconds later, the staccato rounds of an automatic rifle pounded the steel door as the rest of the assault team must have reached the hallway. The gunfire continued without pause.
He had no time.
To make matters worse, he was blind. With the door shut, the laboratory was pitch-black. He skidded deeper into the room, one arm in front to keep from crashing into something.
“Where?” he yelled above the ringing cacophony of the assault.
Ahead, a flashlight ignited, spearing the room with a dazzling brightness. It revealed the others hidden behind the heavy bulk of a Van de Graaff accelerator, part of a larger complex that extended deeper into the cavernous room.
Painter hurried toward them, scanning the roof for the C4.
“Behind you!” Kowalski yelled from his shelter. “Above the door.”
Painter swung around and stared up. The flashlight’s beam centered on a yellow-grayish glob of explosive crammed into a crevice above the door. It looked like an old stress fracture that had recently been patched. Kowalski had chosen a good spot.
He raised his shotgun—just as the double doors were yanked open in front of him. Gunfire strafed blindly into the room. Painter stumbled away and dropped to his back. A pair of commandos rushed into the lab under the cover of the barrage. Kowalski returned fire from his sheltered position.
Painter caught a glimpse of the soldier he’d Tasered out in the hallway. The guy pointed an arm, barking orders, clearly the leader.
Painter couldn’t give him any more attention than that.
From the floor, he lifted his shotgun, centered his aim on the patch of C4, and pulled the trigger. The shotgun blasted, the XREP dart flew out, and a spat of electricity sparked along the roof as it impacted—but nothing else happened.
Kowalski swore, clearly girding himself for the pitched firefight to come.
What had gone wr—
—a deafening boom knocked the wind from Painter’s lungs and flung his body against the bulk of the accelerator. As he flew back, he watched the two commandos in the room get flattened, pounded first by the shock wave, then buried under a tumble of cement, twisted rebar, and soil.
Smoke and dust rolled across the room, billowing deeply into the facility.
Dazed, he felt his body lifted off the floor. Kowalski had him under one arm, hauling Kai with the other. Ears still ringing, he struggled to get his legs under him. Ahead, slabs of broken debris blocked the doorway, cutting off the hunters. Painter craned up. In the smoke-choked darkness, light flowed down through the roof.
Moonlight, achingly bright.
They’d done it.
11:42 P.M.
Rafe stood before the desk that held his laptop. He folded his fingers atop his head, staring at the ruins of a hallway as his team retreated. He finally let out the long breath he’d been holding.
He lowered his arms, balling both hands into fists.
He glanced to Ashanda, as if silently asking her if she’d witnessed what had happened on the screen. She still sat with the small boy, who looked half comatose from shock.
Rafe could relate.
His heart pounded, firing his blood. While he was certainly angry, a part of him could not help but be impressed.
So our quarry found some help . . . a bodyguard with some skill.
If nothing else, Bern had gotten a good picture of the wily culprit from his helmet-mounted camera, just before the explosion dropped the roof. While the photo was grainy, the camera managed to capture a full view of his face. The new enhancing software and facial-recognition program developed by a Saint Germaine family subsidiary for Europol should make short shrift of identifying the man.
Over the radio, Bern’s voice came garbled with digital dropouts. “. . . escaped on foot. Local law enforcement and emergency response teams are already arriving on-site. What . . . orders?”
Rafe sighed, damping down the fire in his blood. It was a shame. With the limits of his body, it wasn’t often he got to enjoy such a heady rush of adrenaline. He spoke into his throat mike. “Clear out. The targets won’t remain in the area. We’ll pick up their trail again.”
It sounded like Bern wanted to argue, furious at the loss of his teammates. It must be his Aryan blood, fueling that Germanic desire for immediate revenge. But Bern would have to learn patience. If there was one true source behind the wealth and power of the Saint Germaine family, it came from their knowledge of, appreciation for, and skill in le long jeu.
The long game.
And with his unique mind, there was no better player than Rafael Saint Germaine. For others this might be a mere boast, but he’d proven himself time and again. It was why he stood here now, assigned by the family to chase after a treasure going back millennia.
Was there any longer game?
After Bern signed off, Rafe crossed back to his laptop and brought up the image of the shadowy intruder into their affairs. Many primitive cultures put great stock in names, believing that to obtain such details granted special powers over others. Rafe believed this down to his crumbling bones.
He leaned on his fists atop the desk and stared at his adversary.
“Vous êtes qui?” he asked the man.
It was a question he desperately wanted to answer.
Who are you?
12:22 A.M.
From the passenger seat of the SUV, Painter watched the lights of Provo vanish into the distance in the rearview mirror. Only now did he let his guard down.
Slightly.
Against his better judgment, Kowalski was again behind the wheel of their rental, in this case, a white Toyota Land Cruiser. Where they were going, a four-wheel-drive vehicle would be needed. Painter wasn’t up for the long drive himself. His upper arm still throbbed from the bullet graze, and his head ached from the concussive explosion.
Maybe I’m getting too old for this . . .
He flashed back to his couch at home, Lisa fingering the white lock in his dark hair, noting the gray notes elsewhere. What was he doing out in the field? This was a younger man’s game.
Proving this, Kowalski seemed little fazed, nursing a thermos of coffee to keep him alert for the overnight drive. A glance to the backseat revealed Kai leaning on Professor Kanosh, with one hand resting on the old man’s dog. Both were asleep, but a pair of canine eyes—one brown, one blue—stared up at him, wary, guarded.
He gave the dog a nod. Keep an eye on her.
T
his earned a weak thump of a tail.
He turned back around, still heavy-hearted. After their escape across campus, he’d had to break the news about the murder of Professor Denton. Kanosh had looked crushed, aging in seconds. He’d lost too many close friends in the span of a day. Only the need to put some distance between them and the hunters had blunted the anguish. So after a quick stop at a CVS pharmacy for first-aid supplies for his wound, they set out of town.
They were headed to some friends of Kanosh, a group of Native Americans who were living off the grid. Painter wanted to get Kai somewhere safe. Plus he needed answers to his questions about what was really going on out here.
His cell phone vibrated in his pocket. Frowning, he fished it out, checked the caller ID, and raised it to his ear. “Commander Pierce?” He was surprised by the call at this late hour, especially from the East Coast, where it was two hours later. He kept his voice low so as not to disturb the others.
“Director Crowe,” Gray said, “I’m glad you’re okay. I heard from Kat about the attack. She asked me to give you a call.”
“Concerning what?”
Painter had already reached out to Sigma Command. He’d briefed Kathryn Bryant on the events in Utah. She was helping with the aftermath of the blast at the university, while using her resources in both federal law enforcement and various intelligence communities to help identify the team who invaded the physics lab.
Gray explained, “I believe I might have some insight on the attack.”
The words sharpened Painter’s attention. The last he knew Gray was investigating some lead about the Guild. He had a bad feeling about this.
“What sort of insight?” he asked.
“It’s still preliminary. We’ve barely scratched the surface, but I think some information Seichan obtained is tied to events out in Utah.”
Painter listened as Gray told a story of Benjamin Franklin, French scientists, and the pursuit of some threat tied to pale Indians, to use Franklin’s term for them. He leaned forward as the history unfolded, especially concerning a shadowy enemy of the Founding Fathers, one who used as their trademark the same symbol as the modern Guild.
“I believe the discovery of that cave ignited the Guild’s attention,” Gray said. “Clearly something important got lost long ago or was hidden from them.”
“And now it’s resurfaced,” Painter added.
It was an intriguing thought, and from the sophistication and brutality of the night’s assault, the attack definitely had all the earmarks of the Guild.
“I’ll keep working the angle out here,” Gray said. “See what I can dig up.”
“Do that.”
“But Kat wanted me to call you for another reason, too.”
“What’s that?”
“To pass on news of an anomaly that’s reverberating throughout the global scientific community. It seems a group of Japanese physicists have reported a strange spike in neutrino activity. It’s off the scales, from what I understand.”
“Neutrinos? As in the subatomic particles?”
“That’s right. Apparently it takes violent forces to generate a neutrino burst of this magnitude—solar fusion, nuclear explosions, sunspot flares. So this monstrous spike has got the physicists all worked up.”
“Okay, but what does this have to do with us?”
“That’s just it. The Japanese scientists were able to pinpoint the source of the neutrino spike. They know where the burst came from.”
Painter extrapolated the answer. Why else would Gray be calling? “From the blast site in the mountains,” he concluded.
“Exactly.”
Painter let the shock wash through him. What did this news mean? He questioned Gray until they were talking in circles, getting no further. He finally signed off and sank back into his seat.
“What was that about?” Kowalski asked.
Painter shook his head, causing the dull ache behind his eyes to flare. He needed time to think things through.
Earlier, he’d talked to Ron Chin, who had been monitoring the blast site. He reported a strange volatility there, described how the zone remained active, spreading deeper and wider, eating away anything that it came in contact with, possibly denaturing matter at the atomic level.
Which brought Painter’s thoughts back to the source of the explosion.
Kanosh suspected something hidden inside the golden skull, something volatile enough that just removing it from the cave had caused it to explode. He’d also found evidence that the mummified Indians—if they were Indians—possessed artifacts that indicated some sophisticated knowledge of nanotechnology, or at least some ancient recipe for manufacturing that allowed them to manipulate matter at the atomic level.
And now this news of a spike in neutrinos—particles produced by catastrophic events at the atomic level.
It all seemed to circle back to nanotechnology, to a mystery hidden amid the smallest particles of the universe. But what did it all mean? If his head wasn’t pounding like a snare drum, he might be able to figure it out.
But for the moment he had only one firm sense, a jangling warning.
That the true danger was only starting.
Part II
Firestorm
Chapter 14
May 31, 3:30 P.M.
Gifu Prefecture, Japan
“We should tell someone,” Jun Yoshida insisted.
With his usual insufferable calmness, Dr. Riku Tanaka merely cocked his head from right to left, like a heron waiting to spear a fish. The young physicist continued to study the data flowing across the monitor.
“It would be imprudent,” the small man finally mumbled, as if to himself, lost in the fog of his Asperger’s.
As director of the Kamioka Observatory, Jun had spent the entire day buried at the heart of Mount Ikeno, in the shadow of the massive Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector. So had their Stanford colleague, Dr. Janice Cooper. The three of them had been monitoring neutrino activity following the early-morning spike. The source had been pinpointed to a mountain chasm in Utah, where some explosive event had taken place. But the exact details remained sketchy.
Was it a nuclear accident? Was the United States trying to cover it up?
He wouldn’t put it past the Americans. As a precaution, Jun had already alerted the international community about the spike, refusing to let such knowledge be buried away. If this was a secret experiment gone awry, the world had a right to know. He glared a bit at Janice Cooper, as if she were to blame. Then again, her incessant cheeriness was reason enough for resentment.
“I think Riku is right,” she said, speaking respectfully to her superior. “We’re still struggling to pinpoint this new source. And besides, the pattern of this new burst doesn’t look the same as the one in Utah. Perhaps we should hold off on any official announcement until we know more.”
Jun studied the screen. A graph continued to scroll, like a digital version of a seismograph. Only this chart tracked neutrino activity rather than earthquakes—but considering what they’d found, it was earthshaking in its own right. For the past eighty minutes, they’d picked up a new surge in neutrino generation. Just as before, it appeared to be coming from earth-generated geoneutrinos.
Only Dr. Cooper was correct: this pattern was distinctly different. The Utah explosion created a single monstrous burst of neutrinos. Afterward it had died down to a low burble, like a teapot on a stove. This new surge of activity was less intense, coming in cyclical bursts: a small spike, followed by a stronger one . . . then a lull, and it repeated, like the lub-dub beat of a heart.
It had been going on for over an hour.
“This has to be related to the earlier event,” Jun insisted. “It’s beyond statistical possibility to have two aberrant neutrino surges of these magnitudes within the span of a day.”
“Perhaps one caused the other,” Tanaka offered.
Jun leaned back and took of his glasses. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. His first knee-jerk reaction
was to reject such an idea—especially considering its source—but he remained silent, contemplating. He had to admit it wasn’t a bad hypothesis.
“So you’re suggesting the first spike ignited something else,” Jun said. “Perhaps an unstable uranium source.”
In his mind’s eye, he pictured that initial burst of neutrinos radiating outward from the explosion, particles flying in all directions, passing through the earth like a swarm of ghosts—but leaving a trail of fire, capable of lighting another fuse.
“But neutrinos don’t react with matter,” Dr. Cooper said, throwing cold water on that idea. “They pass through everything, even the earth’s core. How could they ignite something?”
“I don’t know,” Jun said.
In fact, there was little he understood about any of this.
Tanaka pressed ahead, refusing to admit defeat. “We know some mysterious explosion generated this morning’s spike in Utah. Whatever that source was, it is very unique. I’ve never seen readings like this before.”
Dr. Cooper looked unconvinced, but Jun believed Riku might be following the right thread. Neutrinos were once thought to have no mass, no charge. But recent experiments had proven otherwise. Much about them remained a mystery. Maybe there was an unknown substance sensitive to neutrino bombardment. Maybe the Utah explosion of particles had lit the fuse on another deposit. It was a frightening thought. He pictured a daisy chain of blasts, one after the other, spreading around the globe.
Where would it stop? Would it stop?
“This is all conjecture,” Jun finally concluded aloud. “We won’t know any true answers until we find out where this new surge is coming from.”
No one argued with him. With a renewed determination, they set to work. Still, it took another half hour to finally coordinate with other neutrino labs around the globe to triangulate the source of these intermittent bursts.
They gathered around a monitor as the data collated. A world map filled the screen with a glowing circle that encompassed most of the Northern Hemisphere.