“Hi there,” said Grant Thorn, flashing his movie-star smile at the cameras. “Khalid Osir invited me to visit the Osirian Temple. Well, here I am!”
“What brings you here, Mr. Thorn?” said Shaban, bland politeness barely covering his contempt—and suspicion.
Grant made himself comfortable on the leather couch in Osir’s lounge. “I was in Switzerland to meet some of the backers of my next movie—gotta keep the moneymen sweet, right?” He grinned. “Since I was here, I thought I’d take Mr. Osir up on his offer to watch his old movies together. Is he around?”
“My brother is … out of the country,” said Shaban.
“Aw, man! When’ll he be back?”
A small, crooked smile. “Not for some time. But your trip might not be wasted. The temple is holding a special ceremony tonight—you will attend. If you prove your faith and loyalty, you will be rewarded.”
“Cool,” said Grant. “But if Mr. Osir’s not here, who’s holding the ceremony?”
“I am in charge.” A larger smile, edged with smugness.
Someone knocked at the door. A large, gray-haired man entered: Lorenz, face still bruised from the fight in the Hall of Records. “The first bus is coming.”
Shaban nodded, then turned back to Grant. “I have to prepare for the ceremony. Wait here—someone will come for you.”
“Looking forward to it,” Grant said as the two men left. He waited several seconds, then took a cell phone from his pocket—a phone with an open line. “Did you get that?”
“We got it,” said Nina into her wireless headset.
Half a mile up the valley, a pair of Mitsubishi Shogun 4 × 4s and a panel van were parked overlooking the castle. The van’s boxy cargo area was large enough to contain the six-foot-diameter zodiac, but it was currently serving as an impromptu command post for a team of ten soldiers from the Egyptian government’s Antiquities Special Protection Squad.
“What kind of ceremony?” asked Assad, in charge of the unit. Nina could only shrug, and Macy had nothing helpful to offer either. He frowned, turning to one of his men. “He mentioned a bus. See if there’s anything heading for the castle.” The black-clad soldier nodded and jumped out. “The ASPS are only equipped for a surprise raid. If there are more people there than we expected …”
“What do you want me to do?” Grant asked. “This zodiac dealie, it’s in a room full of Egyptian stuff—I saw it on the way in.”
Assad shook his head. “We can’t do anything until we have visual proof that Shaban has the zodiac. The minister made that very clear—this operation is on shaky enough diplomatic ground as it is.”
“We should have given Grant the camera,” said Macy.
“I think that might have made them a teensy bit suspicious,” Nina pointed out. “Grant, I think the best thing for now is just stay put. Keep the line open; if there’s any trouble, we’ll let you know so you can try to get out of there.”
“Escaping from a castle? Hey, I already did that in Condition: Extreme,” Grant told her, unruffled.
“Well, you only get one take here, so be careful.”
“Will do.” Grant returned the phone to his pocket.
The soldier climbed back into the van. “A bus just arrived—they’re lowering the drawbridge for it,” he told Assad. “I checked the road along the lake, and there are more coming.”
“This ceremony must be a big thing,” said Nina, concerned. “What do we do?”
Assad frowned again, thinking. “We came here to see if Shaban has the zodiac. Let’s get proof first.”
Nina nodded, then spoke into her headset. “Eddie?”
Grant’s Mercedes had parked in a lot to one side of the pyramid, near the courtyard’s wall. When Grant was taken to Shaban, his chauffeur had remained in the dark-windowed vehicle.
The chauffeur was Eddie Chase.
“I’m here,” he said, donning his own headset, a clip-on unit similar to a Bluetooth earpiece—with a small video camera protruding from its side. “What’s the situation?”
Nina updated him on what Grant had told her. Eddie looked past the pyramid to the castle’s gate, seeing the two halves of the drawbridge lowering. There was a dull bang and a rattle of chains as they met, and then a coach crawled across. From the number of faces Eddie glimpsed through the windows, the large vehicle was full to capacity. The bus stopped at the other end of the parking lot.
“Jeez,” said Nina, seeing the passengers disembark over the video link. “There’s a lot of them—and there are more buses coming. How are you going to get into the keep with all those people around?”
“Piece of piss,” Eddie told her. He had been watching the guards patrolling the battlements through the car’s sunroof—their attention was now focused on the crowd spilling from the bus. He slid across to the front passenger seat, then silently opened the door and slipped out. He had deliberately parked the Merc beside a large SUV; now he hunched in the shadows, keeping perfectly still until he was sure nobody had seen him exit. Satisfied, he moved forward until he could see the whole courtyard.
The pyramid’s blank glass flank lay ahead, the bus off to the left. To the right was a small ornamental garden—he could use the bushes and trees as cover to reach the keep’s side entrance. “Okay, I think I can get inside without being seen. Which floor’s the zodiac on?”
“The third,” said Nina.
“Is that the American third floor or the British third floor?”
He smiled at her faint sigh; transatlantic terminology differences were a reliable way for him to wind her up. “American, of course.”
“So, the second floor. Okay.” He crossed the gap to the next car and crouched behind it, checking the battlements, the courtyard—
He froze.
Shaban!
The cult leader emerged from the keep’s main entrance, heading for the pyramid in the company of three men. Eddie recognized two of them: Broma and Lorenz, apparently taking over the role of Shaban’s personal guard from Diamondback. The third, carrying a cylindrical metal container, was unfamiliar.
Nina knew him, though. “Eddie—the guy with glasses, he’s one of the scientists I saw in the lab.”
Eddie was more interested in the object he was holding. There was a symbol marked on the stainless steel. He narrowed his eyes, trying to make it out as the four men approached the pyramid.
They disappeared from sight behind the structure’s blue-edged corner. But he had seen all he needed to see. He recognized the symbol: It had appeared in his SAS training for NBC warfare.
Three sets of curved horns, arranged in a circle. Biohazard. The cylinder was a containment flask.
For a biological agent.
He suppressed an involuntary chill. The cylinder’s contents weren’t an immediate threat: If they were, Shaban and his followers would all be wearing hazmat suits. But considering what the Egyptian had said in the tomb, the potential for enormous harm was there—and for all Eddie knew, the four men had already immunized themselves.
He had stopped one biological attack four years earlier. Now he had to stop another.
“Uh, Eddie, where’re you going?” Nina asked as he moved back into the SUV’s shadow.
“I’m gonna blow up that lab. Top of the pyramid, right?”
“That—that’s not why we’re here, Mr. Chase!” Assad stammered. “Our top priority is finding the zodiac.”
“My top priority’s making sure some fucking nut-job who thinks he’s an Egyptian god doesn’t start spreading killer spores around the world.” Eddie watched as the cultists headed for the entrance through which Shaban had just gone. He wondered why they weren’t using the nearer doors on the side of the pyramid facing the drawbridge, but decided it didn’t matter. What did matter was that they would give him a way in.
Assad and Nina both continued to protest, but he ignored them, taking a closer look at the newly arrived cultists. Unlike the mix of ages and sexes at the Osirian Temple’s gatherings in New York a
nd Paris, this group was predominantly young men, though still of varied nationalities. Shaban’s own personal followers from around the world?
Bent low, he moved to the cover of a car closer to the pyramid, then reached up to his headset. “Okay, I’ll have to go off-mike. Can’t exactly stroll in there with a camera strapped to my head.”
“Eddie, don’t—” said Nina, but he had already removed the earpiece and clipped it unobtrusively to the bottom of his jacket.
The crowd, around fifty people, filed past, led and trailed by more green-jacketed guards. There was a lot of conversation: The tone was excited, expectant, but also tinged with what Eddie could only think of as gloating. Whatever the ceremony was, it already had the feel of a victory rally.
A glance up at the battlements, another at the guards behind, waiting for their view to be partly obscured by the throng—then he stood and smoothly matched pace with the group as if he had just emerged from the car.
He tensed, ready to fight or run. Since he was already inside the castle he doubted the cultists would question his right to be there, but if the trailing goons thought he was out of place …
Nobody shouted in alarm. A young man gave him a mildly curious look, but returned to his conversation with another. Relieved, but still alert, Eddie marched with the group into the pyramid.
There was no sign of Shaban or the men with him in the lobby, but there were more guards. “Everyone will wait in here. The temple will be opened soon,” one called over the hubbub as the cultists filled the space, another repeating the instruction in French, then Arabic. Eddie stayed near the fringes of the crowd, checking the exits. A glass elevator rising at an angle, a set of large frosted glass doors that he assumed led to the temple, two more smaller doors to each side. The lift couldn’t be the only way to reach the upper floors—there had to be stairs somewhere.
A few minutes later, another group of cultists entered. Then another. The lobby quickly became packed to bursting point. Eddie made sure he was right by one of the side doors as the original group moved to make room for the newcomers. A guard was nearby, but he just needed a brief distraction …
It came when the temple doors opened. Everyone instinctively turned to see, pushing closer—and Eddie slipped unseen through the side door.
As he’d hoped, it led to a stairwell, the sloping outer wall forcing each flight to ascend at odd angles like an Escher painting. He donned the headset again as he headed for the pyramid’s peak.
“Eddie!” Nina snapped as the monitor finally showed something other than the crotch of her husband’s jeans. “About damn time! What’s going on?”
“Shaban’s gathering the faithful, by the look of it.”
“Yeah, we saw—three busloads of them. I meant, what’s going on with you? What the hell are you doing?”
“I told you—I’m going to take out that lab.”
“With what? You don’t have any explosives—you don’t even have a gun!”
“I think I’ll manage.”
One of the ASPS standing with Assad flinched at Eddie’s insouciant tone. “What is it?” Assad demanded.
The soldier rushed to one of the equipment cases stacked in the van—and gasped an Arabic obscenity. “Sir, there are two packs of C-4 missing.”
“C-4?” Macy asked as Assad gaped at him.
“Explosives,” said Nina. Macy edged away from the case.
“Yeah, I borrowed ’em while you were getting set up,” Eddie announced, as casually as if he’d taken a pencil without asking.
“Chase!” Assad shouted. “Get out of there immediately! You can’t use explosives in there—it’ll be a diplomatic catastrophe!”
“Then why did you bring them in the first place?” said Nina, jumping to Eddie’s defense despite sharing the Egyptian’s feelings.
Assad looked sheepish. “As a … contingency.”
“Well, this is contingency-y,” said Eddie. “And diplomacy’ll be the last thing to worry about if Shaban’s turned that crap into a bioweapon. If I take it out now, problem solved. So I’ll go upstairs, plant these charges, get Grant, and blow the place up before anyone even knows I was here—”
On the screen, he reached the landing of the upper office level—and a door opened in front of him, a guard freezing in surprise as he came face-to-face with the Englishman.
“Or not,” Eddie said as he and the guard stared at each other.
The other man snapped out of his shock and tried to grab him, but Eddie slammed a knuckle punch into his throat and sent him lurching back.
The guard lashed out at Eddie’s eyes, but he whipped his head backward and smashed his boot into the cultist’s groin, then punched him in the face so hard that the back of his skull smacked against the door. The guard slithered to the floor, out cold.
Eddie dragged him through the door. The offices were lit only at a low level, the occasional screensaver glowing beyond the glass walls. The employees of both Osiris Investment Group and the Osirian Temple were either done for the day or filing into the temple downstairs.
“Eddie! Are you okay?” Nina asked.
“Yeah, fine.” He pulled the unconscious man out of sight, then examined him. He was roughly Eddie’s build, and only marginally taller …
“Does Nina know about this side of you, Eddie?” said Macy as the Eddie’s-eye view showed him stripping the limp guard of his jacket and trousers.
“Funny girl,” he replied. The image abruptly shifted, the camera pointing up at the ceiling.
“What’re you doing?” asked Nina.
“I don’t want to scare Macy with what’s in my pants.”
Macy had become used enough to his innuendos to respond only with an eye-rolling sigh. Nina smiled. “I don’t think she has anything to be afraid of.”
“Tchah!”
“It’s you who’s got things to be afraid of,” she continued pointedly. “If you get caught, they’ll kill you.”
The camera aimed ahead once more. Eddie’s hand—now holding a gun—filled the screen. “They can try.”
“They will try, Eddie! Don’t take any stupid chances.”
“You know me, love.”
“Yes, and I’d like to go on knowing you! Be careful, okay?”
“I will. Mr. Assad?”
“Yes?” Assad said.
“Get your boys ready. However this turns out, there’ll be trouble—and they’ll need more than tear gas and pepperballs to deal with it.”
“I see,” Assad said, unhappy. A nod to the ASPS, and the soldiers opened more cases, taking out compact FN P90 submachine guns. “Another contingency,” he told Nina and Macy. “I really hope we don’t have to use them, Mr. Chase.”
“Depends on Shaban, dunnit?” The Eddiecam tipped downward to show him slipping the gun inside his newly acquired green jacket, then picking up the two C-4 packs and their radio detonator to squeeze them into the tight-fitting garment’s outer pockets. “All right, I’m ready.”
“Good luck,” Nina whispered as he moved out.
Eddie returned to the stairwell. No sounds of activity above or below. He didn’t know how long he would have before the guard was missed, so he quickly ascended to the top floor.
There was only one route he could follow, which brought him to the elevator. A man was waiting for it; he glanced casually at Eddie as he came through the stairwell door, then did a slight double take. Eddie concealed his concern—the man didn’t seem alarmed, just mildly puzzled by his appearance—and gave him a polite nod, keeping his head turned to conceal the earpiece. The lift arrived just as he passed it; the man boarded without looking back.
The strong scent of yeast hit his nostrils as he entered the next room. “Smells like a baker’s armpit in here,” he said. The opposite wall was glass, giving him a view of the space beyond. The lab was right under the pyramid’s cap, the walls rising to meet almost at a point; above was the spotlight sending its beam toward the Pole Star.
There was only one person
inside the chamber, his back to Eddie as he examined an object on a workbench.
One of many objects, all identical. More stainless-steel containment flasks, all bearing the biohazard symbol.
“Shit,” Eddie hissed. “You seeing this? There must be fifty of the fucking things!”
“Oh my God,” Nina said quietly. “Shaban’s big event, it’s not just a ceremony—it’s a start. He’s brought in all his followers from around the world … and he’s going to give them the spores to take back with them!”
“So quickly?” asked Assad in disbelief. “He only left the tomb four days ago!”
Eddie surveyed the lab, taking in the large vats used to culture the yeast, the ovens to dry it and extract the spores. The canopic jar, now open, stood inside a glass cabinet. “Psycho billionaires never hang about with this kind of stuff, do they?” He noticed that the ovens were fed by large tanks of compressed gas. A good place to start an explosion …
If he could get to them. The lab’s inner door had a keycard lock, and the windows were designed to contain a biohazard—handgun fire would only scuff them.
“How’s he going to get in?” he heard Macy ask, but he was already heading for the door. He reached out—
And knocked.
The triple-glazed window absorbed the sound. He rapped harder, finally catching the scientist’s attention.
“Open the door,” Eddie mouthed, gesturing for him to come over.
The scientist frowned, but came to the door. He said something, voice barely audible through the glass. Eddie had basic lip-reading skills, but couldn’t make out his words, the scientist presumably speaking in a foreign language. Nevertheless, he smiled and nodded.
The man frowned again, bewildered, and swiped his card through the lock. The door slid open. “Hi there,” said Eddie.
The scientist switched to English on hearing his voice. His accent was thickly Germanic. “What did you say?”