The Sacred Vault

  Mac suddenly planted both palms squarely on Verma’s chest and shoved him backwards. Arms flailing, he crashed against his subordinate. Both men fell to the floor in an ungainly heap.

  Everyone nearby was shocked - then several of the Indian contingent rushed at Mac . . . including the men guarding the courtyard doors. The Scot winked at Kit, the slight flick of his eyes towards the exit giving the younger man a clear instruction. Alderley, hemmed in by the charge, realised what he was doing and swung a punch at one of the men trying to grab Mac before he too was swarmed.

  Leaving the doorway clear.

  Kit hopped over the outraged, flapping Verma and into the courtyard. Ignoring the resurgent pain in his injured leg, he hurried forward, pulling out his ID and holding it above his head. ‘Interpol!’ he cried. ‘Everyone inside - there’s a terrorist—’

  A pair of black-suited US Secret Service agents dived at him, slamming him to the ground. The world leaders looked round in surprise at the commotion, some reacting with alarm at the last word.

  The agents grappled with Kit, forcing him on to his chest and pulling his arms up painfully behind his back. He struggled, but couldn’t break free: the only thing that could escape was his voice. ‘They’re going to crash a plane!’ he cried. ‘A suicide flight - 9/11! Get out of here! Get out!’

  Those two numbers got everyone’s attention. One agent released Kit’s arm, putting a hand to his earpiece to listen to an incoming transmission over the hubbub - then jumped up and pulled Kit to his feet. The other American agents mobilised as one to surround Cole and clear a path for him to get indoors. To the Secret Service, any hint of a threat to the life of the President was treated as confirmed until proved otherwise; the potential consequences of under-reacting were infinitely worse than the opposite.

  The security details of the other leaders took their cue from the Americans. The courtyard had several exits, all of which led inside the palace; the group split up to run for them.

  The two agents bustled Kit back towards the door. Over the shouts and screams, he heard another noise - a high-pitched buzz, the rasp of an aircraft propeller.

  Getting louder . . .

  Nina and Eddie, watching the news feed, saw the camera pan sharply to catch Kit being tackled by a pair of agents. His mouth moved as he shouted, but the screen had no sound.

  The picture jolted as the press corps panicked, someone bumping the camera. Its operator valiantly tried to cover the action, aiming it at the world leaders, but by now they were scattering in all directions. ‘Oh, shit,’ Nina whispered.

  ‘Any second,’ Khoil croaked. ‘Any second now . . .’

  The image tipped downwards as the cameraman abandoned his post and fled, only flagstones and a section of red carpet visible. Running shadows flickered across the screen.

  A flash—

  The picture jolted, then broke up into stuttering pixellated squares for a moment before cutting out entirely. The screen went black.

  Eddie looked frantically at the remaining screens in the hope that one would reveal more information, but nothing was forthcoming. ‘What happened?’ Nina asked. ‘Oh, God, what happened?’

  Khoil managed a bubbling, coughing laugh. ‘The Kali Yuga has ended, Dr Wilde. That is what has happened. The global collapse is inevitable . . . Lord Shiva will destroy the old age to begin a new one.’

  ‘We can still tell everyone what you’ve done,’ Nina told him, helplessness turning to anger. ‘There won’t be any war if they know you were behind it - no matter what you’ve rigged Qexia to say.’

  ‘This is no longer a time for reason,’ the billionaire said. ‘Emotion will rule - anger, fear, vengeance.’ His gaze moved to a screen above her. ‘Look. There it is . . . the image that will change the world.’

  The live news feed was back, displaying a view from a different camera - this one in the grounds of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, shaking as its operator was jostled by people around him. The enormous palace, lit by banks of floodlights, stood out sharply against the black sky - as did a rising column of smoke and dust, drifting across to obscure the huge dome that was the building’s centrepiece.

  ‘You see?’ rasped Khoil, with rising triumph. ‘They are dead. Qexia is already blaming Pakistan. I . . . I have won!’

  ‘The only thing you’ve won is a kick in the bollocks,’ Eddie snarled, drawing back one foot. Khoil flinched, but Nina grabbed her husband’s arm before he could deliver the strike.

  She pointed up at the screen. ‘Eddie, look!’

  The picture had changed again, to another hand-held camera. The image jerked as the cameraman ran down a corridor, glimpses of ornately decorated walls briefly visible through a pall of swirling smoke. The broadcast was coming from somewhere inside the palace . . . but how far from ground zero? People staggered past, half-seen ghosts with clothing and faces caked in dust.

  Nina and Eddie stared up at the screen, barely daring to breathe. The camera entered a large room. A ragged hole in the far wall was briefly visible before the cameraman turned his attention to the people around him. Those nearest the broken wall were covered in rubble, clearly dead. Others were still moving, dark blotches of blood standing out through the pale dust.

  But despite the carnage, the cameraman was following his journalistic instincts. The image steadied, fixing on individual groups of people. Searching for the surviving world leaders.

  If there were any.

  Black suits, turned grey by the covering of smashed stone and plaster. Secret Service agents. Clustered around someone. The camera shakily zoomed in.

  An agent, blood on his neck and shoulder, slumped back - to reveal the dirtied face of President Leo Cole. But he was still, a pale statue. Nina gripped Eddie’s hand, unable to speak for fear. Was he alive or dead? She couldn’t tell . . .

  He moved, mouth widening in a silent cough. Opening his eyes, he wiped his face and spoke to one of the agents.

  ‘Yes!’ Nina exclaimed, squeezing Eddie’s hand tightly. ‘Never thought I’d be so happy to see a politician talking!’

  The image moved away from Cole, reacting to something offscreen. It hunted through the drifting smoke before settling on another leader: the Indian president, leaning against a wall as two men hurried to help him. ‘The bigwigs got out okay, then - some of ’em, anyway.’ Eddie watched the screen as the camera searched for more survivors. ‘What about Mac, though? And Kit?’

  ‘And Peter,’ Nina reminded him, getting a non-committal grunt in reply. The cameraman continued through the room, people rushing past to help the injured. More powerful faces appeared, the Indian prime minister and Russian president being guided towards clearer air. Behind them—

  ‘Mac!’ Eddie cried, catching a glimpse of the Scot limping towards an exit. His suit was torn, blood smeared over one arm, but he didn’t appear badly wounded. Following him was Kit, supported by a Secret Service agent. An overweight, bearded Indian man jostled through the crowd to speak to him, then the cameraman moved on.

  Nina turned to Khoil, whose expression was slowly collapsing into dismay. ‘They survived. We managed to warn them in time. I guess Qexia couldn’t predict everything. So the question is: what now?’

  ‘We still need to shut down that jammer,’ said Eddie. ‘Soon as we do, Probst can send an SOS.’

  ‘Or we could do it here.’ Nina moved back to the sensor unit, raising her hand to her ear to make another virtual phone call. The keypad reappeared on the screens. ‘We’ll just call—’

  An earsplitting bang came from below, a shower of sparks spitting up from the stairwell with a fierce electrical crackle. Smoke spewed into the dome as all the remaining screens flickered, then went dark.

  ‘What the hell was that?’ Eddie yelled.

  ‘A transformer’s blown!’ As a child, Nina had once been evacuated from school when a faulty transformer on a neighbouring building exploded, starting a fire and knocking out the power for three blocks. The same was happening here, only on a much larger sca
le - and flames rose higher as she watched. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’

  ‘How? That’s the only exit!’

  She looked across to where she had slammed Vanita into the outer wall. ‘Not any more. Come on!’ She hurried over to Khoil.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ Eddie demanded.

  ‘He’s got to stand trial—’

  He pointed at the blood pooling round the billionaire’s broken body. ‘He’ll be dead in five minutes without a medic, and nobody’s going to run through a fire to help this little turd. Especially not me! Besides, he believes in reincarnation, right? He can find out if he was right.’

  ‘But we can’t just leave him,’ Nina protested.

  Khoil’s breathing became more laboured. ‘You . . . you have condemned the world to remain in the Kali Yuga,’ he spat. ‘Shiva will reward me in the next life. He will punish you for eternity!’

  Another loud detonation from below shook the dome, a screen dropping from the support frame and smashing on the floor. The flames in the stairwell rose higher. ‘If we don’t get out of here, we’ll die with him!’ Eddie shouted. He grabbed her arm, pulling her to the steps.

  She looked back at Khoil, seeing that his blank, expressionless android mask had finally been completely stripped away, leaving nothing but anger and hate. Then he was gone as they descended to the walkway, then hurried to floor level. They started for the hole in the dome wall—

  ‘Chase . . .’ said a low, straining voice. Eddie whirled. Zec. The mercenary was still alive - just. He had broken his neck in the fall, his head twisted round alarmingly, but the break was at a vertebra low enough for him to keep breathing. His body was limp, however, still splayed as he had landed. Paralysed.

  Eddie hesitated, then went to him. ‘What’re you doing?’ said Nina, reluctantly stopping halfway to the hole in the dome. ‘If we don’t have time to get Khoil out, we don’t have time for him either!’

  She was right, he knew, but the situation was different. Zec had helped them - saved them. Abandoning him felt wrong . . . even though attempting to get him out of the dome would probably result in them all being killed.

  Zec also knew the score. ‘No, leave me,’ he whispered, before the Englishman could pick him up. ‘Just tell my family . . . that I did the right thing. Tell my son he can be . . . proud of me.’

  ‘I will,’ Eddie promised.

  ‘Thank you.’ A feeble smile. ‘I hope . . . Hugo will not be disappointed when I see him. Now, go. Go!’

  Eddie backed away, giving him a nod of silent thanks before turning to follow Nina. She was already at the exposed section of dome, kicking at the fibreglass panels. He joined her, slamming his sole against one of the geodesic struts. Metal bent, then snapped under a second below. The panels shattered, freezing wind gusting round them.

  The resulting hole was now large enough to fit through. Nina went first, finding herself on a narrow ledge, looking down at the composite building’s roof close to thirty feet below. ‘Whoa! It’s higher than I thought.’

  There was no sign of a ladder. ‘We’ll have to jump,’ said Eddie.

  ‘Are you kidding? We’ll break our legs!’

  Another explosive crackle of electrical fury came from behind them. ‘Well, we could just stand here and watch the aurora, but we won’t have long to appreciate it.’ He ran to one corner. ‘Here!’ he said, pointing down. Though the heat from inside the radar station had melted most of the snow off the sloping roof, the elements had still maintained a hold on some areas, a steep drift having built up against the northern wall.

  ‘It’s not very deep.’

  ‘Better than nothing!’ He clambered over the rail, hung from it . . . then dropped. There was a flat whumph as he hit the piled snow, followed by a string of expletives.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Nina called as he crawled from the drift.

  ‘You were right - it’s not very deep. Come on, jump down.’

  She reluctantly dangled from the railing, muttering darkly before releasing her hold. The drift exploded round her as she landed, the mound of snow doing little to cushion her landing. ‘God damn it!’ she gasped, spitting out ice.

  Eddie helped her up. ‘It’s going!’ He indicated the little windows above them. Actinic flashes from the sparking, overloading transformers stabbed through the orange flicker of flames. ‘Come on!’

  Nina couldn’t see any skylights or other ways back into the building, only the jutting tops of the station’s eight blocky support legs. ‘Where?’

  ‘Behind that!’ He pointed at the nearest leg. ‘Get down and cover your ears!’

  They rounded the structure, finding another snowdrift on its exposed side. Eddie practically threw Nina into it, diving after her—

  The remaining transformers, hulking Cold War relics filled with hundreds of gallons of mineral oil coolant, exploded.

  The floor of the dome erupted with liquid fire, the blast from below ripping the geodesic structure apart. Zec was killed instantly; Khoil, higher up, screamed and thrashed as the flames consumed him in his own personal funeral pyre. The walls of the central core collapsed on to the roof and smashed through it into the floors below, the burning remains of the dome tumbling down on top of the devastation.

  Shielded by the support leg, Eddie and Nina were still pounded by the force of the explosion as the colossal building shook. Flaming fibreglass fragments hailed down around them. Eddie hurriedly brushed cinders from his scalp and crawled to peer round the leg, seeing the communication masts topple and crash to the ground like great steel trees. ‘I think that’s the jammer sorted out, then.’

  ‘And everything else,’ Nina added. ‘This whole building’s going to burn - we’ve got to . . .’ She tailed off.

  ‘What?’ Eddie demanded, suspecting that he wouldn’t like the answer.

  ‘The vault,’ she gasped. ‘We left the vault open - if the building burns down, the debris’ll fall down the elevator shaft and destroy all the treasures!’

  ‘So let me guess - you want us to go down there and save everything? We’ll have a sod of a job carrying that statue back to the lift!’

  ‘We don’t have to take anything out, just make sure they’re protected. Eddie, we have to,’ she went on, pleading. ‘We can’t let them be destroyed, not now. You saw how thick that door was - all we have to do is close it. Even if the building collapses, someone can still recover everything later.’

  ‘Yeah, and they might recover what’s left of us if we’re down there when it happens!’ But he saw her point. The war the Khoils had hoped for might have been averted, but if their private collection of stolen cultural treasures was destroyed, they would still get one last laugh from beyond the grave. ‘Okay, okay. But we’ll have to be quick. I don’t know how long this place’ll hold together.’

  Nina stood. ‘First thing we need to do is get off this roof.’ She gingerly made her way to the edge and looked across the aurora-lit plain. Far below, several people were running for one of the smaller structures at the base’s periphery. ‘Where are they going?’

  ‘Emergency shelter, probably,’ said Eddie, more interested in the building on which they were standing. At one end of the roof, metal stairs led downwards: access so that the flat expanse could be checked for weather damage. ‘C’mon.’

  Skirting pieces of burning debris, they ran for the stairs and descended to a short catwalk. At its end was a door; Eddie kicked it open. A narrow stairwell led down through the composite building. The air was already hazy with smoke.

  They hurried down the stairs, Eddie wincing at the pain from Tandon’s beating. At the bottom, he held Nina back, feeling the door for heat on the other side, then cautiously opening it a fraction in case anyone was still in the building. But the corridor was empty. The way clear, they headed for the elevators.

  Both of the cage-like cars waited at the top of the shaft. Eddie regarded them dubiously. ‘Bad idea, using a lift when there’s a fire . . . but I’m not climbing down that bloody
ladder again.’ They entered one of the elevators, which began its rumbling descent into the glacier.

  ‘Now that the jammer’s down, how long before help gets here, do you think?’ Nina asked.

  ‘Couple of hours, probably.’

  ‘I hope Walther can hold out that long.’

  ‘I hope we can hold out that long. The Khoils are dead, but some of their staff’re still around, and they seemed pretty big on loyalty. I don’t want to have got through all this and then get shot by their pastry chef. When we—’

  They both looked up sharply at a noise from above, a deep metallic groan punctuated by ominous thumps and bangs. The elevator shook, the vertical tracks rattling as the building’s weight shifted on its support legs.

  ‘So,’ said Eddie, hovering a hand over the emergency stop button, ‘are some bits of old junk really that important to the world?’ Nina glared at him. ‘Yeah, thought so.’ He stepped back - then froze as he spotted something in the adjacent shaft. ‘Shit!’

  The cables of the other elevator were moving. They looked up again - and saw that the second car was descending after them. It was moving at the same speed as theirs, meaning it would arrive at the bottom some thirty seconds later. Someone leaned over the guardrail.

  Vanita.

  Holding a gun—

  Nina and Eddie dived in different directions as she opened fire with an MP5K. They were far enough below her to be beyond the range at which the compact weapon could be aimed effectively - but she was unconcerned about accuracy, spraying the lower elevator with bullets. Rounds clanged off the metal floor like hailstones, stray shots striking the girders between the two elevator tracks.

  ‘Jesus!’ Nina cried, wedging herself tightly into a corner in the hope that the car’s frame would give her some protection. ‘I thought she was dead!’

  ‘No such luck,’ Eddie growled, doing the same on the other side. He winced as a shot ricocheted off the guardrail above him. ‘But she’ll be out of ammo any second—’

  The firing stopped. Nina cautiously raised her head. ‘Yes!’