The Eye of God: A Sigma Force Novel

25

Gray huddled with the others on the frozen ferry pier. It was pitch dark under a clear sky, the night bitterly cold compared to Ulan Bator some three hundred miles due south. They were all bundled in parkas with fur-fringed hoods, looking not much different from the sole native who was also crossing to Olkhon Island at this very late hour.

Normally a boat transported visitors to the island from this tiny lakeside village of Sakhyurta, crossing the mile-wide strait that separated Olkhon from the mainland. But in winter, the only way to reach the island oddly enough was by way of public bus.

Not that there was any man-made bridge.

The bus would cross directly over the ice. Apparently, in winter the deep strait froze solid enough to support vehicles. He could even make out the road along the black ice, frosted with a dusting of dry, windblown snow.

Rachel eyed their transportation with a skeptical eye. No one else looked any more confident. Even Kowalski was in a darker sulk than usual.

“I’ve had my fill of trips over ice,” the big man grumbled. “Ever hear of Grendels.”

Gray ignored him. After the team’s gear was stored, he waved everyone aboard. With the passengers all seated, the driver closed the door, ground the gears, and set off over the ice. It was early enough in the season to make Gray polish his fogged window and watch their passage with a twinge of trepidation. By January, the massive lake would entirely freeze over, allowing hardy individuals to trek from one side of the lake to the other.

It hadn’t reached that level of freeze yet. Farther out on the lake, he saw waves churning across its surface. He had read up enough on this body of water to know it was a geological marvel, the deepest lake on the planet, formed by filling a gap between tectonic plates that were slowly pulling apart, enlarging the lake until eventually it would be a new ocean.

That is, if the planet were still intact by then.

He checked his watch. He had spoken to Painter after landing in the nearby city of Irkutsk in Russia, where he learned of the new tighter timetable. Even now, they were down to roughly twelve hours. He imagined Monk was lifting off right about now from Ulan Bator, on his way to California with Dr. Shaw and Duncan.

The plan was for her to study the gyroscopic Eye out there, while he attempted to retrieve the cross here. Maybe she could figure out some solution on her own, but Gray was their fail-safe — assuming he could find that saintly artifact.

But both he and Dr. Shaw were severely constricted by time.

She had a seven- to eight-hour flight back to the States, eating up precious hours. He was in no better position.

He couldn’t begin his search until sunrise. It was too dark to accomplish anything now, and worse, they had no concrete lead on where to even start. The island was forty-four miles long and thirteen wide. The eastern half was all steep mountains, fringed in fir forests, rising to its highest peak, Mount Zhima. The rest of the terrain was a mix of sand dunes, grassy steppes, and patches of larch woods.

Even in daylight, it would be a nearly impossible search, especially without some road map of where to begin looking.

So Vigor had suggested another route.

Why not ask somebody?

The island was populated by about fifteen hundred natives, an aboriginal people called the Buryats, descendants of the original Mongol settlers.

Vigor had used his connections at the Vatican to arrange a rare meeting with their highest shamans. If anyone knew the island’s secrets, it would be the head of this enigmatic religion, an odd mix of Buddhism and natural worship. The Buryats were notoriously leery of foreigners. Women were forbidden from their most sacred places. It was a singular event even to meet a shaman.

But how to get the man to talk?

Gray had suggested laying all their cards on the table — or in this case, showing the shaman all their relics from Genghis Khan. Gray hoped they might act as a key to unlock any secrets his people had about the island.

In the end, the shaman had agreed to meet them, but only at dawn, requiring that they be cleansed in the day’s first light before he would speak to them. No amount of persuading moved the man from this position.

So many hours lost…

But he had to admit, they were all bone-tired, needing sleep and recuperation. Plus, by the time they met with the shaman, Monk and the others would be touching down in California. That left both sides about four hours to work out some solution to the threat looming over their heads.

No pressure there.

Kowalski flinched as the bus hit a ridge of ice and bounced. He had a white-knuckled grip on the seat in front of him, his nose glued to the window. “What’s that out there, near that hole in the ice?”

Gray searched and watched a dark mass slip off the ice and into the water, disturbed by the passage of the bus. “Calm down. It’s just a seal.”

“That’s what they want you to believe,” Kowalski mumbled. “You can’t trust what’s hiding under the ice.”

Clearly the man had some prior trauma concerning ice and open water. Gray let it go. They were almost to land anyway.

Vigor crossed and slipped into Gray’s seat. He pointed out the window toward the dark bulk of the island. “Look at that cape of rock jutting out. It’s called Khorin-Irgi in the native tongue, meaning Horse Head. See how it resembles a horse drinking water from the lake. There are stories of Mongol warriors from Genghis Khan’s time who came here and paid homage at this spot, believing the shape of the cape was some universal acknowledgment of their leader.”

Gray stared harder at the shadowy bulk. He knew the Mongols held their horses in high esteem. He remembered Vigor describing the tunnel that led to the boat of bones in the Aral Sea. It had been shaped like a horse, too.

“Do you think that’s a good place to start looking?” Gray asked.

“I doubt it,” Vigor said. “The cape is one of the busier spots on the island. Someone would surely have found something hidden there by now. My point was that many locations on this island are tied to the mythos of Genghis Khan. We just have to find out which one holds his tomb.”

“And maybe that shaman can tell us.”

“If he knows something, then it’s only professional courtesy that he shares it with another man of the cloth.” Vigor gave him a tired grin. “Do not lose faith, Commander Pierce. If the cross is here, we’ll find it.”

“Yes, but will we find it in time?”

Vigor patted his knee in a fatherly fashion and returned to his own seat. He slipped his arm around his niece, who continued to keep a sharp, concerned eye on her uncle.

With a large bump, the bus climbed off the ice road and onto solid rock. It trundled up the sandy embankment and onto a narrow road that ran the long axis of the thin island. Gray’s team was traveling half its length to reach the largest village on Olkhon. They were to meet the shaman at a sacred spot near there.

Forty-five minutes of rough terrain later, sweeping through the broken brown steppes along the western shore, the bus rumbled down into the sleepy, picturesque village of Khuzhir, a neat little town of timber-framed homes with mossy roofs and brightly painted picket fences marking off small yards or sheep pens. The village hugged a small bay on the western side of the island and had only a couple of places for lodging.

Gray had chosen the smaller of the two. As it was the off-season for tourists, he had rented out the entire place, which consisted of only a dozen bedrooms anyway.

The bus delivered them to its doorstep. It was a two-story log lodge with a nice view of the bay off in the distance. There was a horse barn in back and a line of all-terrain vehicles parked along one side, clearly meant as rentals for its guests to explore the island.

They offloaded and headed inside. The proprietors — an older Russian couple, who did a lot of bowing and gesturing to make up for their poor English — had been expecting them and had a fire roaring in a stone hearth in the small communal room, a welcoming space of plank floors, overstuffed chairs, and a long dining table on one side.

The heat of the fire felt stifling for the first few breaths after the long chilly ride, but as they checked in and settled their room arrangements, Gray found himself drawn to the flames, warming his hands.

Vigor sank into one of the chairs. “I think I’m fine right here.”

“Bed” was all Kowalski said, tramping up the stairs, rubbing his eyes like a kid who had been up well past his bedtime.

Gray didn’t disagree with Kowalski’s plan, proving it by yawning loudly. “Sorry. I think we all should get as much shut-eye as we can. We’ll need to be up an hour or two before sunrise if we’re to meet the shaman for his cleansing ritual.”

“At least you guys will,” Seichan said sourly.

That was another concession that had to be made to accommodate the shaman’s rules. No girls allowed. It was clearly a boys’ club when it came to the Buryats’ sacred sites.

“Seichan and I will have to make a spa day of it then,” Rachel said, “while you all go traipsing out into the cold.”

Still, she didn’t truly look any happier, staring at the back of her uncle’s head. She didn’t want Vigor out of her sight. She even sank into a chair next to him by the fire.

With a final few words, they all settled in for the night.

As Gray climbed the stairs, the wood creaking underfoot, he could not escape the feeling of foreboding. A window at the landing above shone with the light of the comet. But he felt the danger was much closer, like someone stepping on his grave.

Or someone else’s grave.

Seichan followed him up, never even creaking a stair.

Rachel woke in a panic, hearing a gunshot.

She found herself slouched in a chair by a fire. Another loud pop of wood from the hearth calmed her initial fear. She quickly remembered where she was. She checked her watch, discerning when.

Shocked, she shifted in her seat.

“Uncle Vigor, what are you still doing up? It’s past three in the morning, and you have to be awake in another few hours.”

Across the hearth from her, he had a local travel book open on his lap, his reading glasses perched on his nose, reflecting the flames.

“I slept on the plane ride here, took a nap on the drive over.” He shooed her concerns away with a flutter of fingers. “A couple hours of sleep and I’ll be fine.”

She knew every one of those statements was a lie. She had watched him the entire trip. He had never closed his eyes once. Even now, she noted the sheen of sweat on his brow that had nothing to do with the fire. His pallid expression confirmed it.

His insomnia wasn’t from old age. It wasn’t even from his interest in the research book on his lap. It was pain.

She pushed from her chair and slid next to him, kneeling at his feet, hugging close to his legs.

“Just tell me,” she said, knowing she needed no more words to clarify what she meant.

He sighed heavily, his eyes wincing slightly at the corners. He placed his book aside and stared into the flame. “It’s pancreatic cancer,” he whispered, as if ashamed — not at being sick but keeping this secret.

“How long?”

“I was diagnosed three months ago.”

She stared up at him, showing him that wasn’t the question she was asking. “How long?” she repeated.

“I have another two, maybe three months.”

Hearing the truth was both a relief and a terror. After so long of not knowing, she wanted the truth, needed the truth, to be able to put a name to her fear. But now that it was in the open, she could not shield herself with false hope.

Tears rose to her eyes.

He reached and wiped them away. “No tears. That’s why I didn’t want anyone to know. I’ve had a good run.”

“You could have told me.”

“I needed…” He sighed again. “I needed this to be my own for a while.”

He shook his head, plainly disappointed he couldn’t explain it better.

But Rachel understood, squeezing his knee. He had to come to terms with his own mortality, its inevitability, before sharing that truth with others.

He then went and gave her more details. Like most pancreatic cancers, his disease was silent, asymptomatic. By the time he felt ill, initially dismissing it as indigestion, it was too late. The cancer had metastasized throughout his abdomen and into his lungs. He opted for palliative treatment only, drugs to stave off the worst of the pain.

“The small blessing,” he said, finding a silver lining amid the darkness, “is that I can still be vital until near the very end.”

Rachel swallowed the lump in her throat, suddenly so very glad she had not restricted him from this trip, one that was likely to be his last.

“I’ll be there for you,” she promised.

“And that’s fine, but don’t forget to live yourself.” He waved a hand along his body. “This is only temporary, a small gift that hopefully leads to a greater glory. But do not waste that gift, do not set it on a shelf for some future use; grab it with both hands and live it now, live it every day.”

She rested her cheek on his lap, shoulders shaking, losing her struggle against her grief.

He allowed it now. He placed a hand atop her head and spoke softly.

“I love you, Rachel. You are my daughter. You’ve always been that to me. I cherish that I got to share my life with you.”

She hugged his legs — not wanting to ever let go, but knowing she must soon.

I love you, too.

Seichan had an arm over her eyes as she lay in bed, holding her own tears in check. She had heard everything below. Her room was directly above the communal space. Every whisper rose to her, amplified by the acoustics of the wooden echo chamber that was this inn.

She had not meant to eavesdrop, but their voices had woken her.

She heard the love in those few words of the priest.

You are my daughter.

The truth cut her to the core — that although Vigor certainly was not Rachel’s father, the two had forged a family despite it.

As she had listened, she had pictured her mother’s face, now that of a stranger, the two of them separated by a gulf of time and tragedy. Rather than trying to renew their roles as mother and daughter, could they forge something new, to begin again as two strangers who shared a lost dream of another time? Could they take those faded embers and stoke something anew?

Seichan felt a flicker of hope, of possibility.

She rolled to her feet, knowing she would not be able to sleep.

Vigor’s advice also stayed with her.

… do not waste that gift, do not set it on a shelf for some future use; grab it with both hands and live it now…

She climbed to her feet and slipped a loose shirt over her naked body. On bare feet, she moved silently from her room and down the chilly hall. She found his door unlocked and slipped into the warmer darkness inside.

A few embers glowed in the room’s tiny hearth.

She stepped to his bed, a single like in her room, covered with a thick quilt and soft down pillows. Pulling back a corner, she slipped inside, sliding along his naked hard body, only now waking him.

He reacted suddenly, startled, a hand grasping her forearm in iron fingers, squeezing hard enough to bruise. Recognition softened his grip, but he didn’t let go. His eyes reflected the hearth’s glow.

“Sei—?”

She cut him off with a finger to his lips. She was done with talking, with trying to put into words what she felt, what he felt.

“What are—?”

She replaced her finger with her lips and answered his question.

Living.

26

Jada jerked her head up as the jet hit an air pocket. Her chin had been resting on her chest, her laptop open before her. She had drifted off as she worked, waiting for some data to collate.

“Push your seat back and get some real sleep,” Duncan recommended, sitting next to her. “Like Monk.”

He thumbed back to the third occupant of the jet’s leather-appointed cabin, who was snoring in a steady drone to match the plane’s engine.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” she scolded, covering a yawn with a fist. “Just thinking.”

“Really?” Duncan lifted his arm, revealing Jada’s other hand clasped to his. “Then may I ask what you were thinking about?”

Her face flushed with heat as she jerked her hand back. “Sorry about that.”

He smiled. “I didn’t mind.”

Embarrassed, she glanced out the window and saw a sweep of clouds and water under them. The clock on her laptop said they had been in flight for a little under three hours.

“We just passed Japan,” Duncan said. “Another five hours should have us landing in California.”

As she stared around the cabin, she remembered another plane, another luxury jet. She had begun this adventure in Los Angeles, flown to D.C., then off to Kazakhstan and Mongolia, and now she was headed back to where it all started.

A full circle of the globe.

All in an attempt to save it.

She hoped it wasn’t her farewell tour. If what Duncan saw through the Eye was real, then the entire planet was at risk.

Her eyes drifted to the box on the table. Before departing Ulan Bator, she had sealed the Eye in a makeshift Faraday cage, a box wrapped in copper wiring, to insulate its electromagnetic radiation from interfering with the jet’s electronics. Passing his hands over the box, Duncan had confirmed that her efforts had indeed bottled up the worst of the radiation. But such a cage would have no effect on the Eye’s larger quantum effect.

That was beyond any prison of copper wire.

Noting her attention, Duncan asked, “So why am I the only one who could see the destruction through that Eye?”

Glad for the distraction, she shrugged. “You must be sensitive to whatever quantum effect the Eye manifests. That makes me believe that what happened to the Eye also affected the glass lens of the satellite’s camera, allowing its digital image sensor to record that peek into the near future as light passed through that altered lens.”

“And what about me?”

“As I mentioned before, human consciousness lies in the quantum field. For some reason, you’re more attuned to the quantum changes in the Eye. Whether because you made yourself that way with those magnets in your fingertips… or because you’re extrasensitive.”

“Like St. Thomas with his cross.”

“Possibly, but I’m not going to go around calling you St. Duncan.”

“Are you sure? I sort of like the sound of that.”

A small alarm chimed on her laptop, as a new folder popped onto her desktop screen. It was the latest update of data from the SMC, sent via satellite.

Finally…

“Back to work?” Duncan asked.

“There’s something I want to check.”

Tapping open the folder, she read through the documents. She planned on building a graph of the comet’s path, tracking its corona of dark energy. Something continued to nag at her, and she hoped more information would jar loose whatever was troubling her.

She began collating the pertinent information and plugging it into a graphing program. She also wanted to compare the latest statistics and numbers to her original equations explaining the nature of dark energy. Her equations beautifully married her theory concerning the source of dark energy — the collapse of virtual particles in the quantum foam of the universe — to the gravitational forces it created. She knew that was the crux of the problem at hand. She could summarize it in one word.

Attraction.

The virtual particles were drawn to each other, and the resulting energy of that annihilation was what imbued mass with the fundamental force of gravity. It was the fuel of weak and strong nuclear forces that drew together electrons, protons, and neutrons to form atoms. It was what made moons circle planets, solar systems churn, and galaxies spin.

As she worked, she began to note errors in the SMC’s equations, assumptions the head physicist had made that were not supported by this latest set of data. She began to work faster, sleep shedding off her shoulders. With growing horror, the truth began to materialize before her mind’s eye.

I have to be wrong… I must be.

Her fingers began furiously tapping, knowing a way to double-check.

“What’s wrong?” Duncan asked.

She wanted to voice it aloud, to share it, but she feared doing so would somehow make it more real.

“Jada?”

She finally folded. “The physicist back at the SMC, the one who did the initial estimates determining when we’d cross the point of no return… he made a mistake.”

“Are you sure?” Duncan looked at his watch. “He said we had sixteen hours. Which still leaves us about another nine hours.”

“He was wrong. He was basing his extrapolations on the fact that the comet’s gravitational anomalies were increasing in proportion to its approach toward the earth.”

“And he was wrong about that?”

“No, that part was right.” She tapped to bring up the graph she had been compiling earlier. “Here you can see the comet’s corona of dark energy being pulled earthward as it swings nearer, growing an ever longer reach.

Jada continued, “Likewise, the curve of space-time around the earth is responding to that gravitational effect. That curvature is bending outward, the two drawing together, slowly creating that funnel down which that barrage of asteroids will tumble.”

“So if the physicist is right, what’s the problem?”

“He made an error, and I believe the new data supports it.”

“What error?”

“He assumed the growth of the gravitational effect was geometric, growing at a set incremental rate. But I don’t think it is. I think it’s increasing at an exponential rate.” She turned to him. “In other words, much faster.”

“How much faster?”

“I want to run the data through my equations to be certain, but right now I would say we have only five hours until an asteroid strike is inevitable. Not nine.”

“That’s almost half our remaining time.” Duncan leaned back into his seat, immediately understanding the problem. “We’ll be lucky to be touching down in L.A. by then.”

“And considering our past couple of days, I wouldn’t count on luck.”

What the hell…

Duncan sat stunned.

Jada urged him to remain calm until she could confirm her estimates. To accomplish that, she was dumping data into an analysis program she had designed based on her equations.

As he waited, Duncan rubbed his temples with his fingers. “Why did that satellite have to crash in the middle of Mongolia of all places? Why not in freakin’ Iowa? We’re losing precious hours flying halfway around the globe.”

Jada’s fingers froze over the keyboard.

“What?” he asked.

“That’s it… that’s what was bugging me. I’ve been such a fool.” She closed her eyes. “It’s always been about attraction.”

“What do you mean?”

She pointed again to the graph showing the comet’s corona of energy being pulled toward the earth. “The physicist at the SMC theorized that there was something on the planet that the comet’s energy was responding to. And I agree.”

“You said before that you believed it might be the cross,” Duncan said. “Because it was sculpted out of a piece of that comet when it last appeared.”

“Exactly. The two — the comet and the cross — are most likely quantumly entangled and drawn to each other, at least energetically. I was hoping that if the cross was ever found, that by studying its energy — or even the energy of the Eye — I might find a way to break that entanglement.”

He nodded. It made theoretical sense. “And if you did that, the comet’s energy would no longer be attracted to the earth — and in turn, space-time around the planet would not warp toward it.”

“And the funnel would never form triggering the massive asteroid strike.”

Brilliant, Dr. Shaw.

“Two questions,” Duncan said. “How can you be so sure of this attraction between the comet and the cross? And what can you do to break that entanglement?”

“The answer to both is the same. To quote Einstein again, God does not play dice with the world.”

Jada read his baffled expression. “A moment ago,” she said, “you asked why did the satellite crash in Mongolia? That’s the best question anyone could ask.”

“Thanks…?” he said tentatively.

“To answer it, I’ll ask you another question. Where do we currently believe the cross is hidden?”

“An island in Lake Baikal, about three hundred miles north…” Then he understood, his eyes widened. “From a global standpoint, practically in the backyard of where the satellite crashed.”

“And does that not strike you as wildly coincidental?”

He nodded.

And God does not play dice.

He stared at her, wanted to kiss her — more than he usually did. “The satellite fell in that general vicinity because it was drawn there, pulled by the energy of the cross.”

“How could it not? It’s charged with the same dark energy of the comet.”

Duncan glanced again to that graph showing the nimbus of energy being sucked earthward. He pictured the satellite as a disembodied piece of that energy, imagining it being tugged out of orbit by the pull of the cross and dragged down to the planet’s surface.

If true, that definitely supported Jada’s theory of entanglement, but it didn’t answer his other question.

He turned back to her. “You said this fact would also answer how to break this entanglement.”

She smiled. “I thought it was obvious.”

“Not to me.”

“We have to finish what the satellite tried to do. We have to unite the energy of the Eye and the energy of the cross. Think of the pair as a positively charged particle and a negatively charged particle. While their opposite charges draw them together—”

“—when they unite, they cancel each other out.”

“Precisely. The energy equivalent of joining matter and antimatter together. The explosive annihilation of the two opposites should break that entanglement.”

It was beautifully theorized, but…

“Why are they opposites?” he asked. “What’s the difference between them?”

“Remember, time is a dimension, too. While both the cross and the Eye are charged with the same quantum of dark energy, they hold two different and distinct flavors of time. Opposite ends of the same axis. One from the past, one from the present. Quantum entanglement means they both want to be one.”

“Meaning they must annihilate each other.”

She nodded. “I believe that will break the entanglement and release the pull on the comet’s energies.”

“Still, that raises the bigger question,” Duncan said. “Where is the cross?”

“I don’t know, but—”

The computer chimed again, interrupting her, announcing the completed run of Dr. Shaw’s program. A number glowed within a blinking results box.

5.68 hrs

“But that’s how long we have to find it.” Jada turned to him. “You know what we have to do.”

He did.

Duncan climbed out of his seat, crossed over to Monk, and shook his partner awake.

“What…?” Monk asked blearily. “Are we there?”

Duncan leaned over. “We need to turn this plane around.”

27

With the sun still down, Gray woke to his limbs tangled with another’s, a warm cheek resting on his chest. The scent of their bodies, their passion, still hung in the air. His left hand clasped her shoulder, as if fearful she would slip between his fingers, turn into a ghost, a fevered dream.

She stretched, a languorous motion that was all soft skin and a hint of sinuous power stirring beneath. She made a contented noise that rumbled into his bones. Tilting her head, she opened her eyes, reflecting what little light there was in the room. She moved her leg lower, stirring him, waking him further.

He reached and touched a finger under her chin, drawing her up to him. Their lips brushed with a promise of—

His phone jangled loudly on the nightstand, breaking the spell, reminding them both of the world beyond this small knot of blankets and bed. He groaned between their lips, pulling her harder against him for a long moment, then let her go and rolled to the phone, keeping one hand on the curve of her hip.

“We’ve landed in Irkutsk,” Monk updated him. “Caught a good tailwind. Got here faster than expected.”

It was the second time his friend had interrupted them; the first time had been a couple of hours ago, informing Gray of his team’s intent to join them out there.

“Understood,” he said tersely. “That means you’re still about two hours out from us.”

The plan was for Seichan and Rachel to wait for Monk’s group at the inn. Gray would take the others, learn what they could from the shaman, and rendezvous back here to regroup.

He checked his watch. They had to depart in forty-five minutes if they wanted to catch the sunrise ceremony at the grotto by eight.

Gray quickly finished his call and dropped the phone on the floor next to his bed. He moved his hand to the small of her back and rolled her under him.

“Now where were we…”

Half an hour later, Gray stepped from the room, followed by Seichan, both freshly showered. She wore only a long shirt. To him, there was no reason for her to wear any more clothing — but the chill of the hallway was a reminder of the subzero temperatures awaiting them both. With her hand in his, he swung her forward and kissed her deeply, sealing a promise of more to come.

As he let her go, a door opened down the hall and Rachel stepped out, catching them as they broke apart. She seemed momentarily flustered, then simply ducked her head, embarrassed, but Gray noted the small smile. She already knew of his tentative relationship with Seichan, but apparently now she knew it wasn’t so tentative.

Rachel mumbled a good morning and headed downstairs, where the smell of cooking bacon and fresh-brewed coffee beckoned.

With a final peck, he sent Seichan back to her own room to change and headed below. In the communal space, the inn’s proprietors took the breakfast part of B&B seriously. A lavish spread had been set out: soft cheeses, toasted breads, blackberries, hard-boiled eggs, thick slabs of bacon, fat sausages, along with an assortment of grilled and pickled fish from the lake.

Vigor sat at the table with a cup of tea warming in his hands. He looked tired, pallid in color, but there was an air of contentment about him this morning. Rachel passed behind her uncle, kissed him on top of his head, and grabbed a plate.

Gray headed over to join them, earning a raised eyebrow of amusement from Rachel, as if to say about time. Apparently her initial shock and embarrassment was settling into good-natured teasing. He also thought he noted perhaps a wistful hint of regret. But maybe that was his own ego reading too much into her look.

Changing the subject — though no one had spoken — Gray asked, “Where’s Kowalski?”

“He’s already eaten.” Vigor nodded toward the door. “He went to check on our mode of transportation.”

Through a side window, Gray spotted his partner’s shaved head out in the dark, inspecting the ATVs parked next to the inn. They’d be taking the big-wheeled vehicles to a small grotto at the farthest point of the bay.

Gray tucked into a big plate of food, while Vigor checked on the duffel holding the cache of relics. Kowalski stamped back inside, bringing the cold with him. He looked anxious to get going.

“Are we ready?” Gray asked as he popped a final few blackberries into his mouth.

“Gassed up,” Kowalski said. “Can go anytime.”

By now, Seichan had returned. She touched Vigor on the shoulder as she slipped past him, her fingers squeezing with some unspoken understanding. The gesture seemed oddly intimate — not so much sympathy as silent support — as if she were acknowledging something that only she knew.

Gray glanced inquiringly at her as she sat down.

She gave a small shake of her head, indicating it was private.

Gray finally stood up, drawing Vigor to his feet, too. “We’ll leave you both to hold down the fort,” he told Seichan and Rachel. “Monk and the others should be here a little before nine, so be watching for them. We’re not going to have a whole lot of time to coordinate. According to Dr. Shaw, it looks like our timetable has shrunk yet again.”

He explained about the revised estimate, about the plan to unite the cross and the Eye.

“And all this must happen before ten o’clock?” Vigor asked, sounding outraged. “Sunrise is at eight. That gives us only a couple of hours to bring the Eye to the cross.”

“Then we’d better get that witch doctor talking fast,” Kowalski said.

“He’s right,” Gray conceded. “But the island isn’t that large. As long as the location is not too remote, it might be doable.”

It must be doable, he silently corrected.

Buried in his parka against the frigid cold, Vigor rode the all-terrain vehicle down a sandy tract through a coastal forest of larch trees, the ground littered with fallen, brown needles, leaving the branches above bare against the brightening sky. Though the sun had not yet risen above the horizon, dawn glowed to the east.

Their path ended up at a curved stretch of beach, dusted with snow and fringed by ice that swept out a good ways into the bay. Sections had been shattered by past wave action, turning into knee-high shards of blue glass.

Beyond the frozen border, the early sheen of the day cast the waters an indigo blue. The water was so clear it could be drunk without fear of intestinal upset. In fact, if you swam in it, local legends claimed, it would add five years to your life.

If only that were true, Vigor thought, I’d dive in despite the cold.

Still, he was glad that he’d finally told Rachel the truth about his cancer. He had words that needed to be spoken, and he was glad that he had the time to share them. He did not fear death so much as he did the loss of the years he would have with Rachel: to see her grow, get married, have kids, to see them flourish.

So much he would miss.

But at least he got to tell her how much she meant to him.

Thank you, Lord, for that small blessing.

Ahead, Kowalski swerved and skidded his all-terrain vehicle, seemingly determined to test its limits against rolling over. Only the young were convinced of their own immortality, willing to challenge death with such abandon. Age eventually wore down that confidence, but the best of us still kept tilting at windmills despite that knowledge — or maybe even because of it, appreciating each day, living to the fullest, knowing one day there would be no more.

As they hit the beach, Gray slowed to ride alongside Vigor, drawing him out of his cold reverie. He pointed ahead toward a tall rock jutting out from the ice field and rising high and pointing at the sky.

“That’s Burkhan Cape?” Gray asked.

It was also called Shaman’s Rock, home to the gods of the Buryats, known as tengrii. The site was considered one of Asia’s ten most sacred places.

Vigor nodded, shouting into the wind blowing off the lake. “The ceremonial grotto is on the far side, facing the water. That’s where the shaman will meet us. At the end of this beach, there should be a narrow isthmus that runs out from the shore to the cape.”

Gray nodded and sped up. He reined Kowalski in, and they swept around the curve and onto a thin strip of land that extended across the ice to a rise of craggy white cliffs, frosted with red moss.

A small figure stood at the end of the isthmus, guarding passage onto the promontory. He was a skinny young man in a long sheepskin jacket over a blue belted robe. He carried a hide drum slung over one shoulder. He waved for them to stop and turn off their engines, not looking happy about the racket. Vigor knew that in the past visitors used to cover the hooves of their horses with leather, so as not to disturb the gods of the cape.

“My name is Temur,” he said in strained English, bowing slightly. “I am to take you to Elder Bayan. He is awaiting you.”

Kowalski manhandled the duffel from the back of Vigor’s bike and they set off after the young man along a narrow path through the broken rock and up some icy hand-hewn steps in the rock face. A large cave mouth opened above them, facing the lake.

Vigor found himself wheezing by the time they had scaled the cliff and entered the cavern grotto. Flanking the entrance were two stone cairns, wrapped in colorful scarves and flags that flapped in the steady wind off the water. Between them knelt a wizened old man of indeterminate age. He could be sixty or maybe a hundred. He was similarly attired as the younger man, only with the addition of a tall peaked hat. On his knees, he was attending a fire, tossing in dried juniper branches, casting forth an indolent smoke that swirled about the cavern.

Farther back, a tunnel led deeper into the promontory, but Vigor doubted even his Vatican credentials would gain them access back there.

“Elder Bayan wishes you to kneel to either side of him and turn your faces to the lake.”

Gray waved them forward to obey.

Vigor took to one side, his friends the other. The smoke stung his nostrils and eyes, but it smelled oddly sweet. Temur began slowly beating his drum while the shaman recited prayers, wafting a burning juniper branch in his hand.

Beyond the mouth of the cave, the dark lake slowly brightened, turning the waters from a deep indigo to a sky blue. Ice glistened in a thousand hues of cobalt and sapphire. Then in a flash, fire spread across the water and ice, ignited by the first rays of the sun, flowing like molten gold.

Vigor let out a small gasp at the sight, feeling privileged to witness this. Even the wind died down for a breath, as if awed by the sight.

Then with a final loud bang on his drum, Temur turned to them. “It is done. You may now speak to Elder Bayan.”

The shaman stood, motioning them to their feet.

Properly blessed, Vigor climbed up and bowed to Elder Bayan. “Thank you for meeting with us. We have a matter of urgency and seek someone who has great knowledge of Olkhon.”

Temur translated their conversation, whispering in Bayan’s ear.

“What do you wish to know?” the young man asked for the elder.

Vigor turned to Gray. “Show him the relics.”

Taking the duffel from Kowalski, Gray unzipped the bag and carefully removed the objects, placing the skull and book down, alongside the tarnished silver box. Gray opened the lid and revealed the boat inside.

The only reaction from the elder was a slight widening of his eyes.

“What is all this?” Temur asked, but the question didn’t come from the shaman, only from the young man’s curiosity.

Instead, the shaman stepped forth and hovered his hands over each object, again whispering prayers.

Finally, he spoke again, and Temur translated. “The power is old, but not unknown.”

Vigor stared at Bayan’s wrinkled hands.

Did he feel the same energy as Duncan?

The shaman ended up with his palm resting above the skull.

“We know what you seek,” Temur continued, speaking for Bayan. “But to trespass there is with great danger.”

“We will be happy to face that danger,” Vigor said.

Bayan frowned once this was whispered in his ear. “No, you will not.” Temur turned specifically to face Vigor. “Elder Bayan says you are suffering much, but you will suffer more.”

Misgiving rang through Vigor. He glanced at Gray.

Temur continued, “I am to take you to what you seek.”

Vigor should have been overjoyed by this offer, but instead he found himself growing colder as the shaman continued to stare at him, his ancient face a mask of sorrow.

Vigor had accepted his death as inevitable. But for the first time in many months, he began to fear what was to come.

Rachel walked through the horse barn at the back of the property. She tugged the zipper of her parka down. She had meant to take a walk after breakfast, needing to burn off nervous energy but also to think about her uncle.

She fought against wanting to control his disease, making lists in her head: which doctors to call, which clinics to consult, which new therapeutic trials to enroll in. But in the end, she knew she must simply let that go. Vigor had clearly made his peace. She must, too.

But she could not sit still in the quiet inn. She also didn’t know what to say to Seichan after seeing her leave Gray’s room. It was too awkward, so she went for a walk — until the cold drove her back to the inn, with her nose numb and her cheeks burning from the blustery weather.

Rather than immediately going back inside, she ended up in the barn, where she could escape the wind. Shadowy horses heated the space, nickering softly at her intrusion. The place smelled of hay, manure, and musty sweat. She walked the length, rubbing a velvet nose of a mare over a gate, offering a handful of grain to another.

Once warmed up, she headed back to the barn door and swung it open. The cold struck her with a gust of wind.

She bent against it and began trudging back to the inn.

A loud crack raised her head, echoing away. It sounded like a loose shutter banging in the wind. More blasts followed.

Gunfire.

She stopped, confused — when an arm closed around her neck from behind, clamping over her throat.

She felt the cold muzzle of a gun at her temple.

Seichan only had a moment to react.

Attuned to her surroundings, she had felt something was wrong. Over the course of the morning, up in her room, she had learned the rhythms of the quiet inn: the murmur of the husband and wife below, the clank of pans, the whistle of wind through the eaves. She had heard the door open off and on, either one of the owners taking out the garbage, or the last time, Rachel leaving to explore the village.

When the door had opened a half minute ago, she had thought it was Rachel returning, but the noises below grew hushed, except for the clatter of a plate to the wooden floor.

She had tensed, muscles going hard, every sense straining. Even the dust in the air seemed to hold motionless in anticipation.

Then a creak on the stair—

She bolted, stopping only long enough to grab her SIG Sauer, still in its holster on her nightstand. She burst out the door, shaking the semiautomatic pistol free. She fled away from the stairs, toward the window at the end of the landing. With her weapon pointed behind her, she saw a shadow rise by the stairs, too furtive. Then a shape appeared, dressed all in winter camouflage.

She fired backward twice, while leaping and striking the window with her shoulder. A cry rose behind her. She had only winged the man, but it offered her enough of a delay to fly out the window in a shower of glass and splintered wood. She landed on the overhanging eave of the first-story roof below and rolled down its side and over the edge.

She fell through the air, twisting around to land on her legs, falling to one arm. She kept the other up, pointing the pistol all around. She had come out behind the house. A patch of forest beckoned across a small yard. She fled toward it — only to see a group of armed men, also in camouflage, appear out of the tree line.

She veered to the right, where she knew a deep culvert ran along the neighboring road. She needed cover and a way to break through the cordon that had clearly been set up around the inn.

She sprinted as gunfire tore the frozen turf around her, blindly firing back toward the woods. She might still be able to make it to safety.

Then a familiar voice rang out past the gunfire.

“STOP OR I WILL KILL HER!”

She didn’t. She leaped the last distance and slid on her belly into the culvert. Ice cracked under her as she swung to face the man who had shouted. Keeping hidden in the deep gutter, she trained her pistol.

Across the yard, by the barn, she spotted a large, powerful-looking man gripping Rachel around the throat.

Ju-long Delgado stood to one side of her.

On the other, Hwan Pak.

The North Korean scientist held a pistol to Rachel’s ear.

“Come out now! Or I will blow her head off!”

Seichan struggled to make sense of the situation. How could they be here? She noted the facial features of the team in camouflage, all North Korean, likely their country’s elite special forces. But how had Pak found her?

Rachel yelled to her, “Run! Just run!”

Her captor cuffed her roughly in the head. Still, she struggled, strangling in his grip.

Knowing they would certainly kill Rachel if she attempted to flee — a course that looked less and less likely to succeed anyway — she finally raised her arms in the air, showing herself.

“Don’t shoot!” she called back.

More soldiers came up from behind her, appearing like ghosts from hiding spots. She scanned their numbers. It seemed Pak had brought an entire assault team with him.

Why?

She was stripped of her weapon and marched over to Pak.

As Seichan approached, Rachel met her eyes. Rachel looked more angry than scared, apologetic for putting Seichan into this situation.

But Seichan could not hold the woman at fault. This was all her own responsibility, a danger she had dragged to this icy doorstep.

The brute holding Rachel must be the military team leader. He wore mirrored sunglasses with a hood pulled low, showing little of his face — what did show looked mean, displaying a cross-hatching of scars. She could smell the threat off the man. He was no new recruit, but a battle-hardened warrior.

Pak turned to her when she arrived. He smiled coldly, promising pain and sorrow.

“Now you will tell us where the Americans are.”

28

Back on the ATVs, Gray led the way with the shaman’s apprentice, Temur, riding behind him. They headed north from the crags of Burkhan Cape, driving atop the thick shore ice, following the coastline.

Kowalski and Vigor kept close behind on their own vehicles.

The morning brightened rapidly, turning the ice into glass, some places so clear it looked like open water. A dusting of dry snow and ice skirted in streams across the surface, pushed by the wind like the crowns of whitecaps.

“Around that tumble of rock ahead!” Temur called. “Another mile or so.”

Using that landmark, they continued along a deserted section of the island, where sheer cliffs rose straight out of the water, topped by dense fir forests. Temur urged them closer to the shore, shadowing his eyes with his hand and studying the coastline.

“There!” he finally called. “That opening. We go in there!”

Gray spotted the mouth of a sea cave. It looked large enough to drive a minivan inside, except rows of massive icicles speared down from the upper edge, like a set of fanged jaws closing down to take a bite out of the ice shelf below. The remaining opening was only large enough to allow their ATVs to enter, if they went single file.

Gray angled toward it, slowing their speed to a crawl. He flicked his headlamp on and cast its light into the dark cave. White frost reflected off every surface, revealing a tunnel leading deeper. Stalactites of ice covered the arched ceiling in a solid mass. Streams of water froze in place on the walls, forming sheets of rippling crystal.

“We’re not going in there, are we?” Kowalski asked, plainly leery. “Caves are one thing, but ice caves…”

As answer, Gray ducked his head below the first row of icicles and crawled his ATV inside, following the beam of his headlamp.

Inside, the space was even more wondrous. The ice under the tires was so clear he could see the mossy rocks far below, spot fish in the flowing water under the ice.

“Looks like it continues a ways!” Gray called back.

He headed deeper upon Temur’s instructions. The tunnel grew larger, the walls sweeping to the sides, the ceiling rising higher. About thirty yards in, the sea tunnel ended at a large cavern, a cathedral of ice. Glistening blue-crystal chandeliers filled the domed roof, while diamond columns rose all around.

As they entered, the pressure of their passage made the ice beneath them groan and pop, the sound amplified and echoed by the sheltering walls. A few fragile branches of the chandeliers broke free and shattered to the ice, tinkling away with a dance of shards.

Across the room, a thick curtain of ice flowed in heavy ripples down the far wall, where a spring-fed waterfall had frozen over. A few trickles still ran down its surface, polishing the ice to a quartz shine, before freezing below.

Closer at hand, in the middle of the floor, a darker stain marred the pristine surface, marking a hole through the ice to the open water below. The steeply sloped sides were stained, worn in some places to form small chutes.

Gray had caught sight of a sleek brown body sliding down one of them as they had first entered. This must be a breathing hole for the most famous mammal of Baikal Lake, the nerpa seal.

With nowhere else to go, Gray stopped his ATV. Kowalski and Vigor joined him, flanking him on either side.

“Where are we?” Kowalski asked.

Temur answered, “This is a birthing chamber for our Baikal seals, where pups will be sheltered in deep winter. It is considered very special to our people. It is said we are descended from the spirit of such hardy, noble creatures.”

“But why have you brought us here?” Gray asked, searching around. He wasn’t in the mood for the full Baikal nature tour, not with the clock ticking down.

“Because Elder Bayan told me to bring you to this cave,” Temur said. “That is all I know. I do not know why he asked me to do so.”

Gray turned to Vigor, who looked equally baffled.

“Maybe the old guy just likes seals,” Kowalski commented.

“Or it’s a test,” Vigor said. “All Genghis Khan’s other sites were well hidden, often where land meets water, like this. But they were made somewhat easier to find because of the drought in Hungary or the ecological disaster of the dry Aral Sea.”

“Well, nothing has changed in this region for millions of years,” Gray said. “We’re getting no free passes here.”

“So it would seem.”

Gray searched the ice-encrusted room, forcing himself to remain calm, realizing one fact. The shaman had not sent them here entirely without resources. Gray remembered Bayan instructing Temur where to take them. It was done with only a few words, yet Temur knew exactly where to go. That could only mean one thing.

“Temur, do your people have a name for this cavern?”

He nodded. “In our native language it is Emegtei, which means a woman’s belly,” he said, pantomiming a swelling on his own stomach.

“A womb,” Gray said.

“Yes, that’s right,” Temur said. He then bowed and backed away. “I hope you find what you seek. But I must now go.”

“My friend can drive you back to Burkhan Cape,” Gray offered, motioning to Kowalski.

Temur shook his head. “Not necessary. I have family not far.”

As the man departed, Vigor motioned to the breathing hole, drawing back Gray’s attention. “A womb. That makes sense. This place is a birthing chamber for the island’s spirit animal.”

Gray shook his head, not disagreeing. In fact, he was sure the monsignor was right. Instead, he was taking a different tack. “Vigor, didn’t you say that Olkhon Island is where Genghis Khan’s own mother was from?”

His eyes widened upon him. “That’s right!”

“So this sacred spot could have been chosen as some symbolic representation of where Genghis originated.”

“His spiritual womb,” Vigor conceded.

Kowalski frowned at the icy cavern. “If you’re right, then his mom must have been one frigid—”

Gray cut him off. “This must be the right place.”

“But how does that help us?” Vigor asked.

Gray closed his eyes, picturing this chamber as a womb, the tunnel to the sea a birth canal, flowing outward with life.

But life doesn’t start in the womb…

It first needs a spark, a primal source.

According to Vigor, Genghis Khan was technologically ahead of his time, and while he might not have known about the fertilization of sperm and eggs, the scientists of his time surely knew about gross human anatomy.

Gray climbed from his ATV, grabbed his flashlight from his pack, and headed across the room, careful of the ice, giving the breathing hole a wide berth. He pointed his flashlight along the back wall, following that frozen flow upward, noting the rivulets of water still trickling across its surface.

Twenty-five feet above his head, he discovered the source of the spring. A black hole marked another tunnel, half full of ice where the spring-fed flow had frozen over.

Vigor understood. “Symbolic of a woman’s fallopian tube.”

Down which life flows to the womb.

“I’ve got pitons and climbing gear in my pack,” Gray said. “I should be able to scale the fall and reach that tunnel.”

As he turned back, he read the desire in Vigor’s eyes and clapped his old friend on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. Once up there, I can rig a line. We’ll go together.”

They rushed back to the ATV, and Gray began assembling what they would need.

Vigor shivered and stamped his feet against the cold, but excitement shone in his eyes as he stared at the tunnel. “That passage up there must be seasonally locked.”

Gray frowned. “What do you mean?”

“In spring and summer, that hole is probably flooded, gushing with water, making it impossible to enter and traverse. Only in winter, when it’s all frozen over, is the tunnel open and accessible.”

Gray paused to consider this. “Could they have done that on purpose? The date on the skull marked the coming apocalypse as November, a winter month.”

Vigor bobbed his head. “They might have been limiting access, preserving the treasure inside until the season when it was best needed.”

After fitting his boots with spiked crampons, Gray straightened with a coil of climbing rope over his shoulder and a harness in hand, fitted with pitons and an ice ax.

Only one way to find out.

Vigor watched Gray ascend the ice wall, holding his breath, a hand at his throat. Be careful…

Gray appeared to be taking no chances. They had no time for accidents or falls. He planted each piton with great care into cracks in the ice, drilling the eyebolts deep. He kept three limbs on the wall at all times, moving steadily, stringing a line as he went.

Three-quarters of the way up, Gray reached high and tested a split in the ripple of ice with his ax — only to have an entire section fall away from the wall. Like a glacier calving, it broke and plummeted below, crashing with a resounding boom. Ice boulders scattered all the way to the parked ATVs.

Gray lost his hold and fell to his last piton, swinging from the rope, but it held. He got his feet back to the ice and continued his ascent with even more care. Finally he reached the top and pulled himself up with the ice ax, digging in with his crampons, into the frozen tunnel.

A moment later, a light bloomed up there, turning the waterfall into rippling blue glass. His head popped back out, and Gray waved a flashlight.

“Passage goes on!” he called down. “Let me secure a line! Kowalski, help Vigor into a climbing harness!”

In short order, Gray had a rope running through an eyebolt screwed into the roof of the tunnel. Kowalski hooked Vigor to one line. By pulling on the other, the big man practically hauled him up the waterfall. Vigor did his best to help, pushing off pitons or grabbing the next.

With hardly any effort, he found himself on his belly next to Gray in the tunnel. Vigor looked down its throat. It looked like a chute drilled through the heart of a sapphire crystal.

“Let’s go,” Gray said, crawling on his hands and knees. “Stick behind me.”

The passage rose at a slight angle upward, making the traverse across the ice flow treacherous. Its surface was slippery, trickling with cold water. One mistake and someone could go body-sledding back down the tunnel and shoot out into the open.

Another fifteen yards and the ice rose so high in the tunnel that Gray had to slide on his belly, squirming like a worm to continue on. Vigor waited at the bottleneck, suddenly feeling claustrophobic.

Gray’s voice echoed back. “It opens past the squeeze! You need to see this!”

Spurred by the excitement in his voice, Vigor repeated Gray’s action, wiggling his way through the pinch. Near the end, a hand clamped onto his wrist and pulled him the rest of the way out, like a cork out of a bottle.

Vigor found himself standing in another cavern, atop a frozen pond. To his left, the shore of the pond rose in a sheer cliff of bedrock, maybe four meters high. Gray pointed his flashlight’s beam to a set of stairs cut into it long ago. The way appeared to lead to a ledge up top.

“C’mon,” Gray said.

They scaled with care. Gray used his ax to clear a few steps of thicker ice, until finally they reached the top.

Gray offered his arm to help Vigor to his feet, but he ignored Gray and stood up, staring at the far wall. Through a thin crust of blue ice, he saw an arched set of black doors.

Vigor gripped Gray’s arm, needing his solidity to make sure what he was seeing was real. “It’s the entrance to Genghis Khan’s tomb.”

Gray didn’t have time to stand on ceremony or savor the discovery. Using the butt of his steel ax, he cracked and scraped at the shell of ice covering the doorway. Huge sheets fell with every strike, the door ringing with each blow, indicating it was metal. In less than a minute, he had the doorway clear.

The archway was no taller than his head.

As Gray brushed the hinges clean, Vigor touched the surface reverentially. He had his own flashlight out and shone the beam at a spot where Gray’s ax had pocked the metal door.

“It’s silver under the layer of black tarnish!” Vigor said. “Like the box holding the bone boat. But look, where the door is gouged deep, I can see splintered wood under the metal. The silver is only plated on the surface. Still…”

Vigor’s eyes glowed brightly.

With the crude hinges cleared, Gray swung a latch up that held the double doors closed. He offered Vigor the honor of pulling them open.

Plainly holding his breath, Vigor grasped the handle and yanked hard. With a grinding of ice crystals still in the hinges, the doors parted and opened wide.

Vigor fell back from the sight.

It wasn’t what they had been expecting.

While nearly empty, it was no less astonishing.

A circular gold chamber glowed before them. Floor, roof, walls… all were covered in rosy-yellow metal. Even the inner surfaces of the doors were plated with gold, not silver.

Gray allowed Vigor to step inside first, then he followed.

Everywhere the gold had been sculpted and carved by skilled artisans. Across the roof, gold ribs led to a circular ring. The walls held posts of gold. The intent of the design was obvious.

“It’s a golden yurt,” Gray said. “A Mongolian ger.”

Vigor stared back at the archway. “And when the door is closed, it forms a solid vault. We’re standing symbolically inside the third box of St. Thomas’s reliquary.”

Gray remembered the skull and book had been sealed in iron, the boat in silver, and now they were inside the final chest, one of gold.

Vigor moved to the right, as if nervous to enter any deeper. “Look at the walls.”

Affixed to each sculpted gold post were what appeared to be jeweled torch holders. Gray reached for one, only to realize it was a crown. He searched the circular space. They were all crowns.

“From the kingdoms Genghis Khan conquered,” Vigor said. “But this isn’t Genghis Khan’s tomb.”

Gray had recognized the same as soon as the doors had opened. This was no sprawling necropolis, full of the riches and treasures of the ancient world. There were no jeweled sepulchers of Genghis and his descendants. That waited still to be found, possibly back in those Mongolian mountains.

Vigor spoke in hushed tones. “These crowns were left to honor the man whose crypt this is.”

Vigor headed along the edge of the room, clearly still working up the courage to move deeper. His arm pointed to the walls between the posts, to the art depicted there. The bright surfaces had been hammered and worked into vast masterpieces. The style was clearly Chinese.

“It was typical for tombs during the Song dynasty to depict the life of the crypt’s occupant,” Vigor said. “This is no exception.”

Gray noted the first panel to the right of the door showed a stylized mountain, surmounted by three crosses. Weeping figures trailed down the hillside, while an angry sky warred above.

The next showed a man on his knees, reaching toward the wounded flank of another floating over him.

Moving through the other panels, that same man made a great, terrifying journey, fraught with symbolic dragons and other monsters out of Chinese lore — until finally he reached the shore of a great sea, fraught with huge waves, where crowds welcomed him with flags and symbols of joy and enlightenment.

“It’s the life of St. Thomas,” Vigor said, as they finished the circuit. “Here is proof that he reached China and the Yellow Sea.”

But that wasn’t the end of the saint’s story.

Vigor finally stopped at the last panel, having traversed the full circle.

The masterwork here showed a giant of a Chinese king handing the man a large cross. Over the king’s shoulder, a comet blazed in a sky full of stars and a crescent moon.

It was the gift to St. Thomas.

Vigor finally turned to face the nearly empty room. The only object preserved in this golden ger was a cairn of stones in the center, not unlike the pillars seen flanking the entrance to the shaman’s grotto.

Only this pedestal of rock supported a black box, simple and plain.

Vigor glanced to Gray, clearly asking permission.

Gray noted the yellowish pallor to the man’s skin. Not all of it was a reflection of the gold, he realized. It was jaundice.

“Go,” Gray said softly.

Vigor crossed to the cairn, to the box it held. He moved on legs numb with awe, close to losing his balance.

Maybe it would be best to approach on my knees.

But he kept upright and reached the stone pillar. The box resting there appeared to be black iron, but it was likely some amalgam as it looked little rusted. On the surface, a Chinese character had been etched.

Two trees.

Just as Ildiko had described and copied.

With trembling fingers, he opened the lid with a small complaint from its hinges. Inside rested a second box. It looked as black as the first, but Vigor knew it was silver beneath that tarnish of age. Again a symbol had been inscribed there.

Command.

He obeyed that instruction and opened it — revealing a final chest of gold nestled within. It looked nearly pristine, shining bright, unadorned, except for the final mark found atop it.

Forbidden.

He held his breath. Using just the tips of his index fingers, he raised the final lid and pushed it back.

He said a silent prayer of thanks for this honor.

Resting inside, supported atop tiny pillars of gold, was a yellowish-brown skull. Empty sockets stared back up at him. Faintly visible, but still there, was an inscribed spiral of Jewish Aramaic.

The relic of St. Thomas.

Vigor came close to falling to his knees, but Gray must have noted him trembling. The man’s arm propped him up, kept him standing for what he must do next.

With tears in his eyes, he reached to the relic. Vigor revered St. Thomas, placing him above all the other apostles of Christ. To Vigor, the saint’s doubt made him all too human and relatable. It was an expression of the war between faith and reason. St. Thomas questioned, needed proof, a scientist of his time, a seeker of truth. Even his gospel dismissed organized religion, declaring that the path to salvation, to God, was open to anyone willing to do just that.

To seek and you shall find.

Had they not done that these past days?

“We found St. Thomas’s tomb,” Vigor said softly, stifled by awe and tears. “The Nestorians, along with Ildiko’s last testament, must have convinced Genghis to build this shrine to the saint. That’s why his gospel was crafted and left in Hungary. It was a written invitation to find this crypt. The first site preserved Thomas’s words — and this last, his very body and legacy.”

Vigor allowed his fingers to touch that sacred bone, to lift the skull from the golden reliquary.

Gray stayed at his shoulder. As Vigor cradled the relic of St. Thomas in his palms, his friend shone his flashlight to the bottom of the chest.

In a sculpted gold bed rested a simple black cross.

It looked heavy, metallic, as long as an outstretched hand.

“The cross of St. Thomas,” Gray mumbled. “But can we be sure?”

Despite the gravity of the moment, Vigor smiled.

While Vigor had no doubt, Gray needed proof.

“Duncan will know,” Vigor said.

Gray checked his watch. “We only have an hour left. I’ll go check on their status.”

“Go,” Vigor said. “I’ll wait here.”

Gray squeezed his shoulder and quickly departed.

Only then did Vigor sink to his knees, cradling the relic of St. Thomas in his lap.

Thank you, Lord, for allowing me this moment.

Still, despite his reverential awe, a flicker of fear remained. He was still haunted by the eyes of the shaman — and his warning.

You are suffering much, but you will suffer more.

Gray skidded his ATV out of the tunnel’s mouth and into the bright morning sunshine. The vehicle spun a full three-sixty on the ice before coming to a stop. He had dared not waste a minute and needed to be outside the cave for his satellite phone to work.

He punched Monk’s number. It was immediately picked up.

“Where are you?” Gray asked.

“On a bus. Driving across the ice. We’re just about to the island.”

Gray bit back a groan. The others were running behind schedule. “I need you to come straight here. I’ll call Seichan in a moment and have her do the same. I’m three miles north of Burkhan Cape, along the coast, out on the ice at the entrance to a sea tunnel. I’ll leave my ATV in the sunshine as a marker.”

“Did you find the cross?” Monk asked.

Flustered, Gray realized he hadn’t even mentioned that. “Yes. But we need Duncan to confirm it.”

And the Eye brought here.

In the background, he heard Jada call to Monk, “Tell him not to move the cross.”

“What’s that about?” Gray asked.

“I’ll let her tell you. I’m going to see about a shorter route to your coordinates.”

“What are you—?”

But Monk was gone and Jada came on the line. “You haven’t moved the cross since you found it, have you?” she asked, sounding scared.

“No.”

He hadn’t even wanted to touch it without corroboration.

“Good. I think the best chance for us to break the quantum entanglement between the cross and the comet is to keep the cross at its current spatial coordinates.”

“Why?”

“Because the cross is currently fixed to a specific point in the curve of the earth’s space-time. I want time to remain the only variable. I can show you my calculations, but—”

“I’ll take you at your word. Just get that Eye here in time.”

“Monk is working on—”

In the background, Duncan could be heard yelling, “That’s your plan!”

Gray heard a rising commotion, people yelling. “What’s going on?”

Jada answered, flustered, but clarifying little, “We’re on our way.”

The connection abruptly ended.

Gray simply had to trust that they knew what they were doing. He called Seichan next. After a longer than expected delay, the connection was picked up.

“Where are you?” Seichan demanded, sounding angry.

Not having the time to analyze her curt response, he simply told her and ended with, “Come straight here.”

She cut off the connection just as brusquely, not even bothering to acknowledge him.

Gray shook his head and headed on foot back inside.

He would have to trust she would do the right thing.

29

Seichan didn’t know what to do.

Pak leaned close to her face. She smelled the tobacco on his breath from the cigarettes he had been chain-smoking since he got here.

“Tell me what they said! Where are they?”

He still held her phone in his hand. Behind Pak, the stone-faced North Korean unit leader — whose name she had learned was Ryung — continued to hold a pistol to Rachel’s chest. Pak had forced Seichan to find out where Gray was, then ended the call before she could warn him in any way.

Both of the North Koreans were clearly losing patience.

Pak stalked across the common room of the inn, angrily puffing on a cigarette. Ju-long hung back by the fire, looking none too pleased about any of this. Seichan got the feeling he was under some coercion. He was a man driven by money and position in Macau. For him, there could be no profit in what was happening here.

Not that such sentiment would lead him to help them.

Rachel was bound to a chair across from her. Both of them had been expertly immobilized by Ryung’s men. There was no magical way to free themselves from this situation. No secret knife, no way to break the chair or slip her bonds.

Seichan knew the reality of the situation. They were both at Pak’s mercy — an emotion she doubted existed in the man.

Recognizing this, Seichan had told them earlier where Gray and the others had gone, to Burkhan Cape. If she had failed to do that, they would have shot Rachel. She had no doubt of that. She only had to stare over to the innkeeper’s legs sticking out the kitchen door, one shoe fallen off, sprawled in a pool of blood, to be certain.

So she told them about Gray’s sunrise meeting at the coast. She sought to buy time, hoping to create a long enough delay for Monk to arrive at the inn and possibly upset the scenario, maybe even rescue them, or at least allow Seichan a possible opportunity to free herself and Rachel during the chaos.

After her earlier confession, Ryung had dispatched a handful of men to Burkhan Cape. They returned thirty minutes later, getting confirmation that Seichan had spoken the truth. But while they were questioning the shaman, the man simply stepped out of the mouth of his cave and threw himself to the rocks below, never revealing where Gray had gone from there.

The North Koreans had to accept she didn’t know either — not that they didn’t use the time to rough the two women up. Rachel and Seichan had matching cigarette burns on the back of their hands as proof.

Then came the damned call.

Pak had used the opportunity to get an update.

“Don’t tell them,” Rachel said around a split lip. “You know what’s at stake.”

Clearly growing frustrated with Seichan’s delaying tactics, Pak stubbed out his cigarette and returned from his angry stroll around the room. He came back rubbing his palms, a gleam of dark amusement in his eyes.

Seichan went cold.

“Let’s make this interesting, shall we?” he said.

Parting his palms, Pak revealed a North Korean silver coin in his hand. On the surface was the smiling visage of the dictator Kim Jong-il.

“You know I am a betting man,” Pak said. “So a game, a wager. Heads. We shoot your friend. Tails. She lives.”

Seichan glared at the man’s needless cruelty.

“I am going to keep flipping this coin until you tell me,” Pak pressed. “The first head that comes up, she dies.”

Ryung fixed his pistol more firmly to Rachel’s chest.

Stepping back, Pak flipped the coin high into the air. It flashed silver in the lamplight.

Seichan relented, knowing she could delay no longer. “Fine! I’ll tell you!”

“Don’t!” Rachel warned.

The coin struck the floor and bounced until Pak trapped it under his boot, wearing a mean smile, enjoying this way too much.

“See, that wasn’t so hard,” he said. “Now tell me.”

She did, telling him the truth, changing tactics. If stalling no longer worked, her best hope was to get them all moving. Once under way, she might find an opportunity to break free.

“Very good,” Pak said, pleased with himself.

He lifted his shoe.

The fat-cheeked face of Kim Jong-il smiled up from the floor.

Heads.

“Looks like you lose,” Pak said and signaled his man.

Ryung stepped back, aimed his gun, and shot Rachel in the chest.

Horror as much as the blast made Seichan jump, rocking her chair back, almost toppling over.

Equally stunned, Rachel stared down at the blood welling through her shirt — then back up at Seichan.

Seichan gaped at Pak, at his betrayal.

He shrugged, looking surprised at her response. “It’s the usual house rules,” Pak said. “Once the dice are in the air, all bets are final.”

Across the way, Rachel’s head slumped to her chest.

Seichan despaired.

What have I done?

Cold darkness enfolded her.

All her strength and heat seeped out the single hole in her chest, taking at last the fiery pain with it. With each fading breath, she felt a small ache remaining, more spiritual than physical.

I don’t want to go…

Rachel struggled to stay, but again it was not a fight of muscle and bone, but of will and purpose. She had heard the others leave the inn, abandoning her to her death.

But Monk would come…

She held on to that hope. She knew he could not save her, not even with his considerable medical skill. Instead, she clutched to that thinning silver strand of her existence for one purpose.

To tell him where the others had gone.

Hurry…

She drifted deeper into that darkness — when the creak of a door, a rush of footsteps, held her a moment longer from oblivion.

A hand touched her knee.

Down that dark well, faint words fell to her, nearly unintelligible, but still the desire rang through.

Where?

She took her last and deepest breath and told them, hope slipping from her lips — not for her, not for the world.

Instead, she pictured storm-blue eyes.

And was gone.

30

“This is nuts!” Duncan yelled.

“This is faster,” Monk said.

Duncan could only watch as his partner hauled on the wheel of the bus, careening its long length around a point of the coastline. He fishtailed across the shore ice, coming close to clipping an ice-fishing hut. Then he was trundling onward.

After Gray’s call, Monk had commandeered the bus, sending passengers and driver fleeing out the door. Monk then got behind the wheel and headed west from the southern tip of the island, blazing his own trail across the open ice. Monk must have anticipated this earlier, as he had spent much of the bus ride from Sakhyurta talking to their driver, asking about the thickness of the frozen shelf, how far it stretched from the coast this time of year.

Duncan somewhat understood his partner’s reasoning. Both of them had plenty of time to study a map of Olkhon Island after landing in Irkutsk. A topographic chart showed that the road from the ferry station to the village inn was circuitous and winding. It would be a slow slog.

Additionally, the island was crescent shaped, bending toward the west at its northern end — where they needed to go.

So the most direct path, from point A to point B, was as a crow flies — or rather a seal swims. By traveling straight across the shore ice, they could halve their time in reaching Gray’s team.

Still…

Jada clung to her seat, her eyes huge.

Ice boomed under them. Cracks skittered in the wake of their passage. People watched from the shoreline, pointing at them.

This far out, the thickness of the ice was questionable at best, so they dared not slow. Momentum was their best hope.

“That must be Burkhan Cape!” Jada yelled, pointing to a craggy promontory sticking out of a forested bay.

Duncan spotted the timbered houses of a small town hugging that same bay. Must be Khuzhir.

“Three more miles!” Monk called and pointed to the windows on the right side of the bus. “Gray said he’d left his ATV parked on the ice as a marker for the sea tunnel. Keep watch for it!”

Duncan moved to that side as Monk finally began angling closer to shore, where thankfully the ice should be thicker. After another long tense five minutes, Jada hollered, making him jump.

“There!” she called out and pointed. “By that big rock shaped like a bear!”

With rounded ears and stubby muzzle, the boulder did look like a grizzly’s head. And past the granite beast’s shoulders, a black dot marked the presence of a lone ATV, a small flag waving from its rear.

“That’s gotta be it,” Monk said.

As they drew nearer, the mouth of a tunnel appeared in the cliff, lined by massive icicles. Duncan thought he spotted movement in the woods at the top of the escarpment, but with the sun rising on the other side of the island, the forest was in deep shadow.

If anyone was up there, it was probably stunned onlookers come to watch the bus.

The brakes squealed as Monk slowed them — or at least, he tried to.

The bus spun sideways, skidding across the ice.

They broadsided the ATV and bulldozed it in front of them, pushing it back toward the mouth of the tunnel.

Duncan and Jada both retreated to the opposite side of the bus as the cliff wall came rushing toward them.

But the vehicle finally slowed to a shuddering stop, coming to rest ten yards from the mouth of the sea tunnel.

Monk rubbed his palms on his thigh. “Now that’s what I call parallel parking.”

Duncan scowled. “Is that what you call it?”

They all tumbled out the door, wanting to make sure they were at the right place before unloading their gear.

Gray came running from the shadows of the tunnel, drawn by the commotion, his eyes huge at their means of transportation. He clearly must have recognized the bus from his own icy sojourn from the mainland to the island.

“What?” he asked with a grin. “You couldn’t find a cab?”

Gray gave Monk a fast hug. It was good to see his best friend, even under the circumstances and his unusual means of transportation.

He quickly shook Jada’s hand, but he pointed his finger at Duncan. “I need you to get that Eye up to that vault. Kowalski’s back there and can show you. We found the cross, but we have no way of telling if it’s energized in any way.”

“I’ll go with him,” Jada said, offering her expertise.

Gray nodded his thanks, staring out across the ice, wondering what was taking Seichan and Rachel so long. He had expected them here before Monk and the others.

Jada stepped back toward the bus. “I left my pack—”

A sharp whistle pierced the morning, followed immediately by a massive blast of fire and ice. Jada got blown into Duncan, who caught her. The concussion knocked them all off their feet and down the tunnel, accompanied by a barrage of broken icicles.

Gray slid on his back, staring past his toes.

Outside, the bus upended, tipping up on its front grill, windows exploding. A fireball rolled from beneath it and into the sky, trailed by a cloud of smoke. The ice shelf shattered beneath its bulk, and the bus sank nose-first into the lake.

A rocket attack.

But who… and why?

Still, a greater question loomed. “Where is the Eye?” Gray asked, fearfully yelling, half deafened.

Duncan helped Jada to her feet. She pointed to the wreckage sinking into the lake.

“My pack…”

It was still on the bus.

“Everybody back!” Gray said, pointing deeper into the tunnel.

They fled away from the rage of fire and smoke — and into the cold darkness of ice and frost.

As they reached a bend in the tunnel, Gray glanced back. The rear of the bus stuck out crookedly from the ice, smoking and charred. Fire spread outward in streams of gasoline and oil. Shadows moved beyond those flames.

Who were they? Russian forces? Had someone in Moscow grown wise to their covert presence on the island?

“Monk, stay here,” Gray ordered. “Alert us if anyone starts into the tunnel.”

And they would, he knew.

Whoever had orchestrated this attack had purposefully targeted their only means of transportation, intending to trap Gray’s group inside here. The reason why didn’t matter. With time running out, only one objective remained: recovering the Eye and getting it to that vault.

Gray led Duncan and Jada back to the cavern. Kowalski anxiously awaited them.

“What the hell, man?” the big man asked. “What’s going on out there?”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said and turned to Duncan. “We need to retrieve Dr. Shaw’s pack from that burning bus.”

“How?” Duncan asked.

Gray turned to Jada. “Do you think you can climb that rope by yourself when the time is right?”

She nodded. “What do you want us to do?”

Gray told them.

“You’re nuts,” Duncan said, looking around for support.

Kowalski just shrugged. “We’ve done stupider things.”

This is becoming a bad habit.

Duncan stood again in his boxers by a body of water — only this time, at the slippery lip to a breathing hole through the ice, its edges worn smooth by the bodies of mother seals sliding into and out of the water. He pictured those same seals dropping into the water here and swimming back through the tunnel, traveling under the ice all the while to reach the open lake.

Duncan wouldn’t have to go that far, but where he was going was still a long distance in one breath. And he didn’t have the fatty insulation of a winter seal.

Neither did his swimming companion.

Jada had stripped to shorts and a sports bra.

Beyond her, Gray and Kowalski readied the two ATVs parked in the cavern, checking weapons. The plan was for them to pick up Monk on the way out.

Duncan returned his attention to Jada, who shivered next to him, but little of her trembling had to do with the cold.

“Ready?” he asked.

She swallowed and nodded.

“Stick to my heels,” he said with a smile. “You’ll be fine.”

“Let’s get this over with,” she said. “Thinking about it is only making it worse.”

She was right.

Duncan cinched the shoulder holster tighter around his bare chest and gave her arm a squeeze. Lowering to his rear, he slid down one of the worn chutes in the lip of the breathing hole. With a short drop, he plunged into the pool of water beneath the thick sheet of ice covering the floor of the cave.

The cold immediately cut through him, worse than he had mentally prepared for. His lungs screamed, wanting to gasp and choke. He forced his legs to kick, his arms to pull, and swam away from the hole. Staying under the ceiling of ice, he headed toward the tunnel leading out. The plan was to swim beneath the ice of the tunnel and get to the outside without being seen.

He twisted back to see Jada splash into the depths. Her body visibly clenched, looking ready to go fetal from the shock, but she fought through it. With a savage kick of her legs, like a stallion striking out at a barn door, she came shooting toward him.

Damn, she was fast.

She had claimed as much when Gray had first proposed this plan.

Duncan kicked off a wall and headed down the tunnel. Diffuse light turned the ice above a deep azure blue, illuminating enough of the depths below to see. He stroked hard to keep ahead of Jada, flipper-kicking to go faster — but also to stay warm.

The tunnel was only thirty yards long, a swim he could normally make in one breath, but in this freeze, trapped under that thick ice, it was a deadly challenge.

He tracked their progress by monitoring the light. It grew brighter with every stroke and kick as he sought the morning sunlight beyond the tunnel.

Still, the cold quickly sapped his endurance. He found his lungs aching for air, his limbs starting to quake. As he neared the tunnel’s end, pinpricks of darkness danced across his vision. He checked behind him, saw Jada struggling, too.

Keep going, he willed them both.

Ahead, he spotted their target. It spurred him into a frantic crawl.

Ten yards from them, the bus rested crookedly on its grill on the bottom of the lake. According to Gray, its rear end still stuck out of the ice above.

With a promise of fresh air, he swam over to its side. The windshield had been blown out by the concussive blast of the rocket. Reaching through, he grabbed the wheel and hauled himself into the shadowy interior of the vehicle. He shot upward past the seats and surfaced inside the pocket of air at the rear of the bus.

Jada appeared a second later.

They both gulped air as quietly as possible, appreciating not only the oxygen but also the warmth. The recent flames had heated the interior considerably. Neither of them complained.

Outside their hiding spot, Duncan heard voices, speaking what sounded like Korean, maybe Chinese. So far no alarm had been raised at their presence. The enemy had not expected its trapped quarry to pop up inside the submerged bus.

It was a small advantage.

He turned to Jada and pointed below. She nodded and they both submerged. Grabbing seatbacks, they pulled themselves back down the length of the bus, searching for Jada’s pack.

Everything loose had fallen to the front of the bus or spilled out the missing windshield. Refreshed with oxygen, Jada swam like a seal herself, while he felt like a blundering whale. She found her pack quickly enough, and they returned to the surface.

Jada checked inside, the relief on her face expressed everything.

He offered her a thumbs-up, which she returned.

They had the Eye.

Impulsively, he reached over and kissed her. He didn’t know if he’d ever get another chance. In that small gesture, he invested so much: a wish for her safety, a thanks for her efforts, but mostly a hope for more to come.

Surprise stiffened her — then her lips softened, warming and melting into his own.

Breaking apart, her eyes shone at him. She somehow looked both more determined and more scared. But she touched his cheek and slipped back underwater.

Duncan shifted to a shattered side window, staying out of direct view. He took in the lay of the land. Ropes draped from the cliffs above. A unit of armed men in military winter camouflage flanked the tunnel’s mouth. He counted the number of enemy between the bus and the cliff.

Not good.

Freeing his SIG Sauer from its shoulder holster, he touched a throat mike and subvocalized to Gray. “The Eye is headed back,” he said. “I’ve got twenty combatants. Ten to each side. I think they’re Korean.”

Gray swore. Apparently this made some sort of sense to the man. “Stick to the plan,” the commander radioed back. “Count to thirty and begin firing.”

Duncan swung back to the window.

Their team had no hope of victory against such odds.

Instead, the plan was a simple one.

Buy as much time with their lives as possible.

Duncan glanced to the dark waters. At this moment, the fate of the world depended on how fast Jada could swim.

31

Jada knew she would not make it.

Fear, cold, and exhaustion had taxed her to her limit. The drag of the pack across her shoulders further hindered her, feeling like a leaden weight, compromising the reach of each stroke. But that was not her worst problem.

A trail of blood wafted behind her, streaming with each pull. She had sliced her right arm to the bone on a jagged piece of blasted metal as she had exited the bus. Heat and strength sapped out of her body with every yard gained, flowing like a crimson flag behind her. She fought to keep going, as pain became numbness.

She had to kick harder as her right arm weakened.

Her lungs screamed for air.

The way became darker — but not because she fled the sunlight behind her for the tunnel. Instead, her vision squeezed, swimming with shadows.

Distantly ahead, she could make out a brighter pool of water, where a flashlight rested next to the hole in the ice, awaiting her arrival, along with warm clothes.

Never make it…

Proving this, her pace slowed, her right arm useless now, dragging alongside her. She flutter-kicked, desperate, but despairing.

A rumble shook through the water to her ears.

She glanced up to see a bright light sweep past her across the translucent ice, heading for the mouth of the tunnel behind her.

She reached and placed her palm against the ice.

Help me…

But they swept away, abandoning her.

Gray raced his ATV toward the morning sunlight. Monk rode shotgun behind him, while Kowalski trailed on the second vehicle. Ahead, the mouth of the tunnel grew larger. He spotted figures sheltering to the left and right.

Koreans, Duncan had said — but Gray knew they were, in fact, North Koreans.

How had they found them? Fear for Seichan, for Rachel, fired his blood. Was that why the women had not shown up by now? Had they been captured? He remembered the strained and brief conversation with Seichan.

They must have held her at gunpoint.

Still, that offered one hope.

The North Koreans clearly wanted to capture him and Kowalski and would likely try to take them alive.

At least, initially.

Gray was under no such compunction.

He heard the first pops from Duncan’s SIG Sauer.

With the enemy’s attention focused on the mouth of the tunnel and the approaching roar of the ATVs, Duncan fired at the Koreans’ rear flank, catching them off guard.

Gray heard screams of shock and surprise at the sudden assault from an unexpected direction. Monk rose from behind and shot over Gray’s shoulder, adding to the confusion.

With a final gun of his engine, he took advantage of the momentary chaos as the enemy was routed, perplexed and unsure how to respond to a battle on two fronts.

A soldier ran into view, framed in the tunnel opening, pointing a rifle.

Monk dropped him with a single shot.

Gray sped to the left of the body, Kowalski to the right.

They spun out into the sunlight, letting go of their handles, spinning their bikes, pistols up and firing in all directions. Duncan shoved open the rear door of the bus, popping into view, firing from on high.

Soldiers in winter camouflage dropped to the ice — either felled or seeking to make themselves less of a target for the barrage.

But Gray knew his team was outgunned and outnumbered. At any moment, the tide would turn against them. Rounds already began to chase their skidding bikes, splintering the ice around them.

They had only one goal here: buy time.

He had warned Vigor to stay in the vault, to await Jada’s arrival, to help her with whatever she needed. The monsignor had agreed, not looking too well anyway.

With that goal in mind, Gray fired and fired, urging Jada to hurry.

Jada struggled for that distant pool of light, kicking and clawing with her one good arm. She heard the gunshots behind her, as the others cast aside their lives for her goal. Such a sacrifice kept her throat tight, fighting the reflex to breathe, though her lungs burned. The rest of her body was ice, growing heavier, more leaden.

Then something bumped her body and swept past, startling a gasp of bubbles from her lips. It was a brown mother seal, sleek and supple in the water. With a twist and roll, it swung back to her and circled smoothly around her waist, brushing against her, then back forward, hovering with invitation.

Through the agony of ice and fire, she understood.

Reaching out with her good arm, she grabbed that tail. At her touch, the seal burst forward — whether startled or purposefully. It shot toward the hole inside the cavern, the closest breath of fresh air, dragging Jada along.

Willing all her strength into her fingertips, she held tight.

In seconds, they reached that bright pool of light and burst upward. Breaking the surface, Jada gasped, sucking air. The seal bobbed beside her, its brown eyes shining at her, as if to see if she were okay. Catching her breath, Jada took a moment to wonder at the sight. Was it just maternal instinct in the seal, seeking to aid an injured fellow mammal? Or was it truly the spirit of the island as Temur had said, coming to her rescue.

Either way, Jada silently thanked her. The seal nudged its nose a few times in the air, then dove away.

Jada swam to the edge, where Gray had left a rope hanging to help her pull out of the water and up the icy chute. Once up top, she crawled on her hands and knees, blood running down her arm and leaving crimson handprints.

She reached a set of blankets and rubbed herself dry. There were clothes there, too, but she ignored them, knowing she didn’t have time to fully dress. Instead, she dropped her pack, pulled on the parka, and zipped it up.

Shaking all over, she slung her pack over her shoulder and stepped into a climbing harness. She pulled it up bare legs and secured it.

She stumbled toward the frozen waterfall, having a hard time controlling her limbs. Once at the base, she stared up the length of rope ascending the sheer cliff of ice.

Grabbing hold, she immediately recognized the futility. She could barely feel her fingers. Her strength continued to leave her with every quake of her limbs.

But gunfire echoed to her.

Her friends were not giving up.

I cannot give up.

Knowing she had only ten minutes left, she pulled herself up to the first piton, then the next. Renewed determination drove her upward, but strength of will was not the same as strength of limb.

She reached with her wounded arm, tried to hold — and slipped, falling back to the hard ice. She stared up, tears of frustration running hot down her cheeks, recognizing the truth.

I’ll never make it.

Gray knew the battle was lost.

The surprise of the initial assault faded as the enemy dug in. A round pinged off the side of the ATV, the ricochet striking Gray’s thigh, burning a line across his hip.

He signaled Kowalski.

The big man dashed his ATV over toward the bus, while Gray and Monk covered him, sweeping across the ice and laying down a fierce barrage of gunfire.

Kowalski reached the broken ice around the bus and spun a one-eighty, skidding to a stop at the crumbling lip of the shattered hole.

Atop the bus, Duncan bounded out of its rear door, ran across its slanted back, and vaulted over the open water below, opalescent with leaking gasoline and oil. He landed hard on the seat behind Kowalski — and the pair immediately rocketed away from the bus in a fishtailing path toward Gray.

As they fled, rounds peppered the side of the bus and cracked shards from the ice.

Monk fired back toward the tunnel as Gray gripped the handlebars with one glove and blasted away with his pistol in the other.

They were all low on ammunition and needed to make a final stand.

He raced toward the tunnel, seeking its cover.

Kowalski barreled behind him.

Monk hit a soldier in the leg, sending him toppling. Others scattered as Gray’s team concentrated their fire at the mouth of the tunnel. With the way clear, his group shot into the tunnel, raced ten yards in, then skidded sideways in unison.

Once stopped, they all fell to the far sides of the parked vehicles, using their bulk as a temporary shelter, setting up a roadblock between them and the enemy.

Gray took quick inventory. Kowalski bled from his shoulder and side. Duncan had an angry graze across his cheek. Monk held a hand to his thigh, blood welling through his fingers.

Still, they all looked fierce and ready to eke out every extra moment for Jada and Vigor to accomplish what they must. Unfortunately, they were down to a few shots each. They would have to make them count.

As if knowing this, the enemy regrouped for their final assault.

Gray braced for it, leveling his pistol.

Instead, a figure appeared, clutching another.

A large North Korean soldier in full body armor held Seichan, an arm across her throat, a pistol against her skull, using her as a human shield. Seichan looked defeated, the fire blown out of her.

“Throw your weapons to us!” a familiar voice called to them. “Come out with your hands on your heads or she will die before you. Just like we killed the other woman.”

The plans that had been revising in Gray’s head blew away at those last words.

… killed the other woman.

Monk clutched his arm, but he barely felt those fingers.

Rachel.

Frozen flashes popped through his head: the rich caramel of her eyes, the way she flipped her hair when angry, the softness of her lips, the stutter of her laughter when caught off guard.

How could that all be gone?

“Gray,” Monk whispered to him, holding him to the present with his tone as much as his iron grip.

Fire welled up inside Gray, blinding him.

At the tunnel’s end, Pak darted out, dashing into cover behind the tall Korean. “Come out now! And you will live!”

The triumphant whine of that insect’s voice snapped Gray back to himself, to his duty. They still needed to buy time to save the world, but Gray had a new purpose: to avenge Rachel.

“What do you want us to do?” Duncan whispered, holding his SIG Sauer.

Gray considered sending the man back to help Jada, but Pak would know one of them was missing and go looking for Duncan, defeating their objective here.

“Do what he says,” Gray said coldly, forcing his jaw to move. “It’ll buy us more time.”

With no other recourse, they threw out their weapons. Pistols skittered across the ice and into the sunshine beyond the tunnel.

Gray stood up, his hands on his head.

The others followed his example and climbed together over the blockage of vehicles.

Clearly knowing he had won, Pak finally stepped free as they approached. He felt at ease enough to light a victory cigarette and pointed its glowing tip at Gray.

“We will have fun, you and I.”

Gray bit back a retort, constraining himself from reacting, trying to keep this guy talking versus entering the tunnel.

He had no idea if Jada had safely scaled the frozen waterfall at the back of the cavern, but the climbing ropes were still there. The enemy would know to follow that path up.

So he only glared.

Reaching the tunnel’s end, Gray found rifles pointed at them, bodies strewn across the ice. At least they had taken out half of Pak’s forces. Others bled from grazes and gunshots.

Gray would have to take satisfaction in that.

To the left, a familiar figure hung back from the others.

Ju-long Delgado.

He glanced at Gray, then at his toes, clearly ashamed of his role here.

It was unfortunate.

The man failed to see the thin shape sail down one of the Koreans’ ropes, landing behind him without a sound — or the flash of silver as the sword pierced him from behind.

As Ju-long fell to his knees with a gasp of surprise, Guan-yin stood there, her dragon tattoo ablaze on her face, shining with fury. She raised her other hand, lifting a pistol into view, and began firing.

To both sides, figures flowed down the other ropes, shooting from above as they descended.

Her Triad.

Stunned, Gray could not fathom how Guan-yin had found them, but such questions would have to wait.

Taking advantage of her mother’s distraction, Seichan stamped her captor’s instep. While the hardened soldier was too professional to lose hold of her, it allowed Seichan to slip lower, her eyes fixed to Gray.

He was already moving, running toward her. The man fired at him, but Gray dropped and slid on the ice. As rounds blasted over the crown of his head, he grabbed the only weapon at hand.

Reaching the soldier’s knees, Gray lunged up with a shattered length of icicle in hand. He drove it past Seichan’s ear and through the man’s exposed throat.

The soldier fell back, dropping his weapon and clutching his neck with both hands.

Gray turned to Duncan. “Go help Jada! Now!”

They were down to a handful of minutes.

With a fire lit under him, Duncan sprinted, not bothering with the abandoned ATVs. He vaulted over them and ran, stretching his stride, trying to stick to the windblown dry snow versus the slick ice.

Gunfire continued behind him, but it was quickly sputtering away as the arriving forces overwhelmed the remaining North Koreans.

Reaching the cavern in seconds, he spotted Jada perched halfway up the ice wall, decidedly struggling. Vigor crouched in the tunnel above her, trying his best to pull her up, but the monsignor was plainly too weak.

As Duncan ran toward them, he noted the trail of blood leading from the breathing hole to the cliff. More icy blood trailed down the frozen waterfall, adding streaks of crimson to the blue.

“Hang on!” Duncan yelled.

“What do you think I’m trying to do!” she called back, both angry and relieved.

Duncan ran to the free line. “Hold tight. I’m going to haul you up.”

He pulled hard, drawing the rope through the eyehole in the roof and towing Jada’s body up to the tunnel. Once there, Vigor helped her clamber inside. Both looked clearly spent.

As Jada unclipped her harness, Duncan called up to them. “Keep going! I’m right behind you.”

Jada waved her acknowledgment, having no breath left to speak.

The pair vanished as he mounted the line and scrambled up.

Free at last, Seichan spun away from the guard who had held her. She heard Gray shout to Duncan and paused only long enough to grab Ryung’s abandoned weapon, the same pistol he had used to shoot Rachel.

She stepped over his impaled body and went after the only target that mattered.

Pak fled across the ice at the first sign of trouble, running for cover behind the half-submerged bus. He had a pistol in hand and shot blindly behind him, panicked by the chaos and the sudden turn of fortune. But as a gambler, he should have known that luck always runs out.

She stalked deliberately after him.

He spotted her, swung his weapon at her, and fired.

She didn’t even bother dodging.

Instead, she lifted her arm and squeezed the trigger.

She placed the round through his knee. He fell headlong with a scream, sliding on his belly, spinning. Reaching the broken ice around the blasted bus, he flew out over the open water and plunged into its depths.

She crossed to the edge and watched him come sputtering up from the cold. Compromised by his wrecked knee, she knew every kick that kept him afloat must be agony.

He struggled over to the edge, seeking a handhold, found one where a corner of the bus met the ice. Unfortunately, the bulk of the bus shifted slightly, settling further as its mass compressed the surrounding ice. The movement pinned his fingers in that crack. He cried out, struggling to free his four crushed fingers.

Seichan’s mother had already taken the fifth one to repay a gambling debt. Pak owed Seichan much more.

“Help me!” Pak said, teeth chattering.

Seichan bent down, seeing hope flare in Pak’s eyes.

Instead, she picked up the cigarette that had fallen from his lips as he spun into the water. She straightened and blew the tip to a glowing red.

Horror replaced hope. Like her, he must smell the leaked gasoline and oil, forming a thick layer on the water.

“Cold, isn’t it?” she said. “Let me warm you up.”

She flicked the bud below. A rain of fiery ash ignited the fumes first, then the pool of oil and gasoline. Flames chased across the blue water, reaching and swamping over Pak.

She turned from his screaming and headed back, leaving him to burn above and freeze below.

That’s for Rachel.

32

Ju-long lay on the ice, his blood spreading in a warm pool under him. He had heard Pak begging for his life as the gunfire died down — followed by his screaming. He felt no pity for the man.

The bastard deserved a cruel end.

And maybe I do, too.

As if summoned by this thought, a face loomed into view, staring down at him, merciless despite her chosen name.

“Guan-yin,” he mumbled. He lifted a hand toward her, but with a tremble, he dropped it, too weak. “Pak has my wife… my unborn son.”

Her face remained impassive, as hard as the scales on her dragon, not accepting his excuse.

“I’m sorry,” he gasped out, tasting blood on his lips. “I… I love them so much… please help them.”

“Why should I help you? After what you’ve done?”

“I tried… how I could… to help.”

A single line creased her brow.

“How did you think you found us?” he said, gasping around a twinge of pain. “Tracked Pak and me to this island?”

“Like you, I have ears everywhere. I heard you left North Korea for Mongolia. So I followed, trailed you. I knew you must still be going after—”

He cut her off. “Who do you think spoke to those many ears of yours? I told them to speak to you.”

It was the truth. Ju-long had to be discreet while with Pak. Using the excuse of monitoring the assassin’s tracker, he was able to regularly call Macau and manipulate matters from afar. While he could not raise his own army in Macau without alerting the North Koreans and risking his pregnant wife’s life, he attempted to raise another, to stoke the hatred of Guan-yin to come to his aid.

He remembered the surprise of the sword piercing his chest.

Apparently he had stoked that hatred too well.

A small miscalculation.

“I drew you here to kill Pak, possibly to free me,” he said with a small laugh full of blood. “To perhaps mend our fences in the end.”

Now all that matters is my beautiful Natalia… and the son I will never see…

Guan-yin leaned back. He saw she believed him. Still, was that enough for her to help? She was not known for the quality of her mercy.

“I will find them,” she finally promised. “I will free them.”

A single tear of relief rolled down his cheek. He knew she would not fail him.

Thank you.

With this burden lifted from him, he allowed his eyes to close — but before they did, another face appeared next to Guan-yin, the pretty assassin who had caused so much trouble.

Only then did he see the resemblance.

One next to the other.

Mother and daughter.

He now understood the cause of his small miscalculation. In the end, it had never been about money or turf — only family.

No wonder you stabbed me.

Finally recognizing the error of his ways, his own silent laughter followed him into oblivion.

“So that’s how you knew how to find us,” Gray said, standing behind Seichan and her mother, eavesdropping on the conversation.

He carried a pistol and guarded over them, as Monk and Kowalski helped the rest of the Triad mop up the situation on the ice.

Guan-yin stood. “Yes, it’s how we knew you were on the island, but the last word to reach us claimed Ju-long would be at an inn at Khuzhir.”

Gray understood. Ju-long must not have had time to call and update his spies before moving here. “Then how did you know to come out here?”

A sad look swept over her features. “We found a woman, shot, still alive. She told us.”

Rachel…

Guan-yin read the rising hope in his face and quashed it. “She did not make it. But it was her dying words that brought us here.”

And saved us all, Gray realized. And maybe the world.

Guan-yin touched his arm. “I think she was hanging on just to get that message out.”

Grief ripped through him, but he held it in check until later.

They were not finished here.

He headed toward the tunnel.

Besides saving the world, he had another mission still to go, one even closer to his heart. As much as it would destroy the man, Vigor deserved to know the fate of his niece.

“And Rachel?” the monsignor asked.

Duncan read the hope in the man’s eyes as they crossed the threshold into the chamber of gold. Jada hobbled on the far side of Vigor, looking upon Duncan with an equal expectation of good news.

After climbing the frozen waterfall, he had caught up with Jada and Vigor on the small pond that served as an antechamber to the golden ger.

Duncan explained as best he could as they scaled the stairs. He had told them about Seichan being held at gunpoint, about the turning of the tides by the arrival of new allies — which still baffled him.

Still, he knew one truth.

“Rachel was killed,” Duncan said, seeing no way to blunt the news.

Vigor stopped a few steps into the room, staring at him in disbelief, his face crashing into ruin. “No…”

Jada stayed next to Vigor as grief felled the old man to his knees. She pushed Duncan toward the rock pillar in the center of the room.

“Check the cross,” she hissed, dropping her pack, going after the Eye inside. “But don’t move it.”

He understood. They needed confirmation that the artifact was what they all sought. He hurried to the nest of three boxes: iron, silver, and gold. A skull rested on the gold floor next to the cairn.

Keeping clear of the relic, he looked down into the innermost box. A heavy black cross rested inside, seated in a sculpted bed of gold that matched its shape.

He reached a hand inside, but even before passing through the outer box of iron, he felt the magnets in his fingertips respond. Again he sensed pressure, as if a force were resisting him. He pushed deeper into that field, drawing his fingers closer to its dark surface.

Again, he recognized the same oily, unnatural feel to the energy, but as his tips drew to within a hairbreadth of the cross, he noted a subtle difference. With this unadulterated power wafting off the meteoric metal, he recognized that this energy — while much the same — had a different flavor to it.

Or color.

It couldn’t be described any other way.

While he had gripped the Eye, he sensed a blackness to it, like the darkness between stars, beautiful in its own right.

Here, he could only express this energy as white.

Jada had said the two items — the cross and the Eye — were opposites, different quantum spins from each other, separate poles on an axis of time.

But there was another fundamental difference.

With the Eye, he found its touch repellent.

Here, he had to restrain himself against grabbing that cross. It was nearly irresistible. Despite the warning from Jada, the tip of his index finger brushed the surface.

As contact was made, that whiteness enveloped him, blinding him.

From his background in physics, he knew black holes sucked all light into themselves, while theoretical white holes cast it all back out.

He felt that way now, cast out, thrust somewhere else, possibly sometime else. Through the brilliance, a figure approached, all in shadows. Like a dark mirror of himself, this shape reached to his outstretched hand, as if going for the cross, too.

As their fingertips touched, Duncan found himself blasted away.

The room returned, snapping so suddenly back he stumbled to the side, clenching and unclenching his hand.

“What’s wrong?” Jada asked.

He shook his head.

“What about the cross?”

“It’s… it’s got energy.”

He retreated from the pillar, but not before noting again the skull on the floor, picturing the shadowy figure in the light.

Could it be…?

Not wanting to think about such a possibility, he reached Jada’s side. “What do we have to do?”

“I think just touch the Eye to the cross. Bringing their opposite energies together should trigger an annihilation, thus breaking that quantum entanglement.”

Duncan pictured that field snuffing out.

“Okay,” he said, holding out his hand for the Eye. “Let’s do this.”

Jada lifted the sphere, but she pulled it away from him.

“What?”

She glanced around. “I think we need this room sealed when it happens. Gold is one of the most nonreactive metals. Pure gold won’t even tarnish.”

“Like silver and iron will,” Duncan said.

“Maybe the ancients knew something. Felt such insulation was important.” Jada stood up. “Either way, I feel it would be safer if everyone else was outside this vault after it’s sealed. It could be dangerous to be in here when those two forces annihilate.”

“Then you and Vigor head out and close the door.”

“Maybe I’d better perform this,” Jada argued. “I’m less sensitive to these energies than you.”

Duncan could not let her risk it.

The stalemate was decided by another.

Vigor surged to his feet and snatched the Eye. He strode toward the ancient boxes. Duncan stepped after him, but the monsignor shoved an arm up, pointing a finger at him, his tone both commanding and grief-stricken.

“Go!”

Duncan recognized that Vigor would not relent.

Jada checked her watch and tugged Duncan’s sleeve toward the door. “Someone has to do it. And we’re out of time.”

With a heavy heart, he fled with Jada for the threshold. As they stepped out and began closing the doors, he watched Vigor step before the pillar, his shoulders slumped, weighted down by grief.

No matter the outcome… thank you, old man.

Duncan closed the door and latched it tight.

Vigor stood before the reliquary of St. Thomas, cradling in his palms a crystal sphere holding the very fires of the universe. Within the triple chests lay a cross forged among the stars and carried by a saint. He should have felt exultant, elated to be allowed this hallowed moment at the end of his life.

Instead, he felt only loss.

He had made accommodation for his death, happy that Rachel would live on in his stead. Maybe part of his inner peace was selfish pride, knowing he would be remembered, that she would tell her sons and daughters, even her grandchildren, about her uncle Vigor and the adventures they had shared together.

He wanted to curse God — but as he stared at the cross, he felt a measure of comfort. He knew he would see Rachel again. He was certain of it.

“I have no doubt,” he whispered.

He followed it with a short, silent prayer.

He had time for no more.

But was that not the lament upon every deathbed? Regret about what could never be, the finality of death, the great destroyer of possibilities.

Sighing, he pictured all his friends, old and new.

Gray and Monk, Kat and Painter, Duncan and Jada.

Rachel had sacrificed everything to keep them safe, to allow them the fullness of their lives, though hers was cut short.

Could I do any less?

Vigor raised the Eye and placed it where the relic of St. Thomas had rested for millennia. It came to fit perfectly upon the small gold pillars that had supported the skull… as if the Eye were always meant to be there.

Only when the sphere touched the cross—

Duncan gasped, stumbling back as if struck in the face by a fierce gust of wind — only he never really stumbled.

Instead, his consciousness blew out of the back of his skull. For a moment, he found himself staring at his body from behind, standing next to Jada, both of them facing the doors.

Then he snapped back, so hard he actually fell forward and hit the door. He caught himself with a palm on the jamb.

Jada stared at him. “Are you okay?”

“I’m suddenly glad I wasn’t in there.”

“What happened?”

He attempted to explain his out-of-body experience.

Instead of being incredulous, she nodded. “The blast from the annihilation of energies likely created a local quantum bubble, bursting outward. And for a sensitive like yourself, where your consciousness is highly attuned to quantum fields, it had a physical effect.”

“And what about someone in that room? At ground zero?”

It was a good question, Jada thought.

And one that frightened her.

Especially after hearing what Duncan had experienced.

“I don’t know,” she admitted in regard to Vigor’s fate. “Nothing or everything. A flip of the coin.”

She realized Vigor was like Schrödinger’s cat. As long as the door remained closed, he was both alive and dead. Only once they opened it would his fate be decided one way or the other.

She pictured the universe splitting, depending on that answer.

Duncan reached for the door to collapse that potential, but before he could do so, a commotion drew their attention behind them. From the tunnel by the pond, Gray crawled into view, spotted them, and rushed up the stairs.

He quickly took in the situation and noted who was missing.

“Where’s Vigor?” he asked.

Jada turned to the sealed door. “He agreed to take the Eye in there, to join it with the cross.”

“Did he do it?”

“Yes,” Jada said.

Gray frowned at the closed door. “How can you be certain?”

Duncan rubbed the back of his head, as if making sure it was still there. “We’re sure.”

Gray stepped to the door. “Then let’s get in there.”

Jada put her hand over the latch, suddenly feeling foolish, as if stopping Gray could truly leave Vigor’s fate undecided.

“There’s a good chance he didn’t make it,” Duncan warned, plainly trying to prepare Gray.

Jada nodded and dropped her hand.

Gray pulled the latch and swung the door open.

Gray stepped into the golden chamber, finding it little changed. The vast murals depicting the life of St. Thomas remained. The cairn of stones stood in the middle of the room. The triple boxes sat on top of the pillar.

Only now Vigor lay crumpled on the floor, his head resting against the relic of St. Thomas.

Gray rushed to his side and rolled him over.

His chest didn’t move.

Fingers at his throat found no heartbeat.

Oh, God, no…

Tears welled up.

He stared at his friend’s face, noting the look of peace, of calm release.

“Did he know?” Gray said, not looking away. “About Rachel.”

“He did,” Duncan said hoarsely.

Gray closed his eyes, praying they were together again, finding a note of comfort in that thought, wanting it to be true, needing it to be so.

Be happy, my friends.

He kept bowed over Vigor for a long breath.

To the side, Duncan stepped to the boxes. He passed his hands over the sphere, picked it up, and examined the cross. He finally shook his head and passed his verdict.

“The energy is gone.”

Did that mean they had succeeded?

Gray had a more important question. “Were we in time?”

Jada checked her watch. “I don’t know. It all happened right at the cusp. It could go either way.”

33

Painter waited with the others on the National Mall. The president and key members of the government had been evacuated. Coastal areas had been sandbagged and cleared. Even Monk and Kat had taken the girls for a short “vacation” in the Amish country of Pennsylvania, away from the potential blast zone.

Though that potential was not high, no one was taking chances.

Even his fiancée, Lisa, had suggested returning early from New Mexico to join him, but he discouraged her.

Washington, D.C., was under a voluntary evacuation order. But like Painter, not everyone had abandoned the nation’s capital. A vast number of people crowded the Mall. Across the swaths of grass, tents had been pitched, candles lit, and much alcohol was drunk. Songs echoed to him, along with a few prayers and angry shouting matches.

From the steps outside the Smithsonian Castle, Painter stared across that great mass of humanity, with their faces raised to the skies — a few in fear, most with wonder. He never appreciated his fellow man more than at this moment. Here were curiosity, awe, and reverence, all the best traits of humankind squeezed down to this one moment, making each soul smaller against the grandeur of what was about to happen and far, far larger for being a part of it.

A scuffle of feet drew his attention behind him. Jada and Duncan came running across the street from the doors of the Castle. He noted their hands clasped together — though they broke apart once they drew closer.

He didn’t say anything about that.

Painter faced Jada. “Don’t tell me that the estimates from the SMC have suddenly changed?”

Jada smiled, carrying a cell phone in her other hand. “I keep checking in. So far it looks like Apophis is on track to hit the earth, but only a glancing blow at best. Still, it should be spectacular.”

Good.

Painter pictured the destruction shown on the satellite image. By severing the quantum entanglement that was drawing Comet IKON’s corona of dark energy toward the earth, they had stopped the potential warping of space-time around the planet, preventing a catastrophic bombardment of asteroids from pummeling a swath across the globe.

He remembered Antarctica, a sneak peek of what might have happened globally. That event had led to the death of eight navy men, and that number would have been much higher, if not for the brave efforts and ingenuity of Lieutenant Josh Leblang, who had heroically rallied his men to safety. Painter was considering recruiting the kid into Sigma. He had great potential.

Still, they were not entirely out of danger — what had already been set in motion by the comet’s passing could not be stopped. A few meteors struck in the remote outback of Australia, more in the Pacific. A large rock hit outside of Johannesburg, but the impact did little more than frighten the animals in a nearby safari park.

The biggest danger was still posed by the asteroid Apophis. It had already been shifted from its regular path, and nothing could be done about that. While Sigma had succeeded in severing that quantum connection, it had done so too close to the point of no return. In the end, it proved too late to stop Apophis from striking the earth, but it was at least in time to keep the comet from pulling the asteroid into a direct path toward the Eastern Seaboard. Instead, the asteroid was destined to hit elsewhere.

Its current trajectory was now along a glancing course through the upper atmosphere, where that longer path should wear away much of its kinetic energy. There also remained a high probability it would explode, but rather than casting its stellar debris across the Eastern Seaboard, it would rain down upon the Atlantic Ocean.

Or so they all hoped.

Painter searched Jada’s face for any sign of misgiving, any doubt in her calculations and projections, but all he read there was joy.

Then Jada turned away from the skies.

Another figure came running down the street, waving to them. She was a tall black woman in tennis shoes, jeans, and a heavy jacket, unzipped and flapping in her haste to join them.

Painter smiled, recognizing the appropriateness of this latecomer to the party. She truly should be here.

“Momma!” Jada said, hugging her mother. “You made it!”

“Wouldn’t miss it!” she said, huffing heavily, clearly having run most of the length of the Mall to make it in time.

Jada took her mother’s hand, leaning against her.

They both stared up at the night sky, as they had so many times in the past, sprawled on a blanket watching the Perseid or Leonid meteor showers. It was those moments that had made her want to explore those stars, to be a part of them. Jada wouldn’t be who she was without her mother’s inspiration.

Fingers squeezed lovingly upon hers, full of pride and joy.

“Here it comes,” Jada whispered.

Mother and daughter held tight.

From the east, a roar rose and a massive fireball streaked into view, burning across the world, trailing streams of light and energy, shedding the very forces of the universe. It ripped past overhead, hushing the crowd with its fiery course — then came the sonic boom of its passage, sounding like the earth cracking. People fell to the ground, windows shattered throughout the city, car alarms wailed.

Jada kept to her feet next to her mother, both smiling, watching the flaming star rush to the east — where at the horizon, it exploded in a blinding flash, casting fiery rockets farther out, vanishing into the distance.

A second boom echoed back to them.

Then the night returned to darkness, leaving the comet blazing in the skies. As they watched, a scatter of a hundred falling stars winked and zipped, the last hurrah from the heavens.

The crowed cheered and applauded.

Jada found herself doing the same, her mother cheering just as loudly, tears shining in her eyes at the wonder of it all.

A line from Carl Sagan struck Jada then.

We are star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

It never felt truer than this moment.

34

Duncan sat on the stool with his shirt on his lap.

The tattoo needle blazed fire across the back of his arm, where his triceps formed a hard horseshoe. The fiery pain was appropriate considering the subject matter being inked upon his flesh.

It was a tiny comet, ablaze with fire and trailing a long curved tail. The design had a slightly Asian flare to it, not unlike what was sculpted in gold back at Lake Baikal, hanging above the Chinese king as he offered St. Thomas his cross.

A bevy of archaeologists and religious scholars were scouring that cave on Olkhon Island. Word was still being kept under wraps from the general public due to the sheer volume of gold inside, not to mention the twelve bejeweled crowns from Genghis Khan’s conquests. Duncan expected the site would eventually become a new mecca for St. Thomas Christians — for all Christians, and likely those of Mongol descent, too.

Vigor would be proud, Duncan thought.

More than saving the world with his sacrifice, Vigor had likely renewed the faith and wonder of millions.

Clyde straightened from his work, wiping a bloody cloth across his latest addition to the tapestry that was Duncan’s body. “Looks good.”

Twisting to check in the mirror, Duncan examined the angry, colorful welting and passed his own judgment. “Looks fantastic!”

Clyde shrugged, humble. “I had practice with the first.”

His friend waved to a neighboring stool, where Jada sat.

She shifted to bring her bare arm next to his, comparing her artwork to the fresh one on his arm. They looked an exact match, a shared mark of their adventure together.

Only this was her first tattoo, the first strokes on a blank canvas.

“What do you think?” he asked.

She smiled up at him. “I love it.”

And from the look in her eye, maybe it wasn’t just the tattoo.

Adorned with their new art, the two headed out of the warehouse and back into the midday sunshine. Out in the parking lot, his black Mustang Cobra R shone like a polished piece of shadow. His muscle car remained a symbol of his past, haunted by the memories of his younger brother, Billy, a blurry mix of sorrow and joy — and also of responsibility.

I lived, and he died.

Duncan had always felt he needed to live for the both of them, for all his friends whose lives had been cut short.

After opening the passenger door for Jada, Duncan slipped behind the wheel. He touched the knob of the gearshift — only to have soft fingers land lightly on the back of his hand. He glanced over to see Jada’s eyes shining at him, full of unspoken possibilities.

He remembered her story in the mountains, of entangled fates, of the prospect that death is just the collapsing of a life’s potential in this one time stream, and that another door could open, allowing consciousness to flow forward in a new direction.

If so, maybe I don’t have to live all those lives…

He leaned over and kissed her, recognizing in the heat of that moment that by attempting to live so many lives, he was failing to live his own.

“How fast can this car go?” she mumbled as their lips parted. A mischievous eyebrow lifted.

He matched it with a smile, curved just as devilishly.

He shifted into gear, punched the accelerator, and rocketed away. The car roared down the bright streets, no longer chased by the ghosts of the past but drawn forward by the promise of the future.

For in this world, one life was enough for any man.

“Thanks for the lift,” Gray said, shouldering his overnight bag as he climbed out of the SUV.

Kowalski lifted an arm in acknowledgment. Puffing on a cigar, he leaned over. “She was a great gal,” he said, unusually serious and sincere. “She won’t be forgotten. Or her uncle.”

“Thanks,” Gray said and pushed the door closed.

Kowalski tapped his horn good-bye and jammed back into traffic, coming close to sideswiping a bus.

Gray crossed to his apartment complex and headed across its grounds, frosted with new snow, making everything look pristine, untouched, hiding the messiness of life beneath that white blanket.

He had flown back an hour ago from the funeral services in Italy, where Vigor’s body had been given full honors at a ceremony in St. Peter’s. Likewise, Rachel’s services were attended by the uniformed and marshaled forces of the Carabinieri. Her casket had been covered in the flag of Italy. Blasts of rifles had saluted at her graveside.

Still, Gray found no joy, no peace.

They were his friends — and he would miss them dearly.

He climbed the steps up to his empty apartment. Seichan was still in Hong Kong, slowly building some kind of relationship with her mother. They had found Ju-long’s pregnant wife imprisoned on an island off Hong Kong, safe and unharmed. They had freed her, and according to Seichan, the woman had returned to Portugal.

On Macau, Guan-yin had filled with brutal efficiency the power vacuum left behind by Ju-long’s passing. She was well on her way to becoming the new Boss of Macau. Using that position, she and Seichan were already taking steps to better the lives of women on the peninsula and across Southeast Asia, starting with the prostitution rings, holding them to stricter, more humane standards.

He suspected these early efforts were a small means of repairing the fence between mother and daughter. By lifting the burdens of other women who shared their same hard plight, they were helping themselves, as if repairing the present could dull the pain of their brutal pasts, to allow room for them to find each other again.

But it wasn’t the only way.

Seichan had taken it upon herself to help the lost children of Mongolia, those homeless boys and girls who had fallen through the steamy cracks of a city struggling into the new world. He knew by rescuing them, she was rescuing that child of the past who had no one.

While in Mongolia, she had also checked on Khaidu. The young Mongolian girl was out of the hospital, her belly healing from the arrow wound. Seichan found her at her family’s yurt, training with a young falcon — a high-spirited bird with gold feathers and black eyes.

Khaidu had named the bird Sanjar.

We each mourn and honor in our own way, he thought.

Gray reached his apartment door and found it unlocked.

Tensing, he slowly turned the knob and edged the door open. The place was dark. Nothing seemed amiss. He stepped cautiously inside.

Did I forget to lock the door before I left?

As he rounded past the kitchen, he caught a whiff of jasmine in the air. He saw a flickering light from under his closed bedroom door. He crossed and pushed it open.

Seichan had set out candles. She must have returned early from Hong Kong, perhaps sensing he could use company.

She lay stretched on his bed, on her side, up on an elbow, her long naked legs dark against the white sheets. The silhouetted curves of her sleek body formed a sigil of invitation. But there was no accompanying sly smile, no tease to her manner, only a subtle reminder that they both lived and should never take that for granted.

Seichan had told him what she had overheard at the inn back at Khuzhir, about Vigor’s terminal cancer, of the final words an uncle and niece were able to share. In this moment, he remembered Vigor’s most important lesson about life.

… do not waste that gift, do not set it on a shelf for some future use; grab it with both hands…

Gray stalked forward, shedding clothes with every step, ripping what resisted, until he stood equally naked before her.

In that moment, with every fiber of his being, he knew the fundamental truth about life.

Live it now… who knows what will come tomorrow?