Area 51: The Sphinx-4 (31 page)

Turcotte felt a slight lessening of his weight as they descended. "How deep are we going?"

"A half mile," Pasha replied.

"Who runs this place?" Yakov asked.

"I do," Lyoncheka said. "The Alien Archives were established by the KGB right after the Great Patriotic War. Section Four was the official response, but of course the KGB trusted no one. As did the GRU, the military's intelligence service," he added with a sideways glance at Katyenka. "So we had three organizations trying to keep things secret from each other as much as anyone else.

"As we became aware of the alien organizations and their infiltrations into human society, we in the KGB realized we had to reduce the number of people aware of the Archives to a minimum." A smile without humor crossed Lyoncheka's dour face. "After many years and purges, Pasha and I have become the minimum.

Even the current director does not know of the existence of these Archives."

Turcotte thought about that. What good had it done the Russians to bury their knowledge like this? In a way, he knew that Lyoncheka had played into the aliens' hands while trying to protect what he had access to from them. The cult of paranoia had a very high price.

The elevator halted with a slight jar. The doors rum-

-267-

bled open. A dank corridor, lit with an occasional light, beckoned.

"We do not have much money for maintenance," Lyoncheka said. "And what little we have, we spend on security devices." He stepped off the elevator. "This way."

He led the way down the corridor fifty meters from the door.

"How much farther?" Katyenka asked.

"The Archives are much deeper," Lyoncheka said. "The elevator was the easiest descent. It gets harder from here."

"Any more gates or security devices?" Katyenka asked.

"No," Lyoncheka said. "We are—" He didn't finish the sentence, as Katyenka slashed the sharpened point of a plastic ice-scraper across Pasha's neck, severing the carotid artery in a spray of blood. Even as Pasha's body fell, Katyenka's other hand grabbed the AKSU and brought it to bear on the three men.

"I told you!" Lyoncheka turned toward Yakov. "I told you not to—" He never finished the sentence, as Katyenka fired a single round. It hit the side of Lyoncheka's head, a small black hole on entry, and ripped out the other side, taking a large portion of brain, blood, and skull with it.

Turcotte had not moved throughout, and he remained still as Lyoncheka's body slumped to the floor.

"Katyenka." The resignation and disgust in Yakov's voice expressed how he felt. "Why?"

Katyenka had the gun trained on the Russian, but Turcotte knew she would stitch him full of holes before he made half the distance to her.

Katyenka shook her head. "I do not need you, comrade, so do not irritate me."

Turcotte noticed movement. He forced himself not to

-268-

look directly. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Pasha, lying in a pool of expanding blood, slowly moving a hand down her side.

"I thought you trusted her," Turcotte said loudly. "You Russian pig!"

"Shut up, both of you." Katyenka shifted the muzzle between the two. "You are children groping in the dark."

Yakov turned and grabbed Turcotte's coat by the lapels. "Don't talk to me like that, you American slime."

Turcotte could see that Pasha had pulled something small and black out. A thumb flipped open a red cover, revealing a switch. At that moment, Turcotte knew what she was going to do and he almost alerted Katyenka, but his discipline prevailed.

With her dying effort, Pasha pushed down on the remote switch. The charges that lined the elevator shaft they had just departed went off in rapid succession. Farther down the corridor, a secondary explosion fired less than a second after the first, destroying the tunnel and trapping them.

Katyenka howled in rage and spun about, firing at Pasha on automatic. The bullets slammed into the already dead body, pushing it down the corridor. Yakov took advantage of that lapse to attack her by the expedient method of tossing Turcotte at her.

Turcotte was prepared for that, twisting in the air and grabbing at the gun as he hit her. He bit back a curse as his right hand closed on the hot, stubby barrel of the AKSU, flesh searing, just as it had in Germany months before.

He ripped the gun out of her hands as Yakov grabbed her arms, pinning her against the wall of the tunnel. The last of the charges went off and the elevator doors buckled as rock and stone filled the shaft. Dust billowed out from both ends of the tunnel, further decreasing visibility.

-269-

"Who are you?" Yakov yelled at the woman struggling in his arms.

Turcotte trained the weapon on her, even as she kicked at the large Russian holding her captive. Yakov solved that by snapping one of her arms like a twig.

Katyenka hissed in pain.

"Do it again and I break the other," Yakov warned. "Who are you? Who do you work for?"

Katyenka spit at him. Her body spasmed, then her eyes rolled back. She went limp.

Yakov held her with one hand while he checked the pulse in her neck with the other. "Ahh!" He laid her on the floor. "She's dead."

"How did she do that?" Turcotte asked.

Yakov was staring down at her sadly. "I trusted her. Almost."

Turcotte knelt next to the body. He pulled up her eyelid and felt ... a contact. He pulled it off. Below was a red iris in a red pupil. "The Ones Who Wait."

Yakov nodded. "They wanted whatever is in the Archives. Lyoncheka must have fooled them all these years, and we led her straight to him." Yakov went over to Pasha's body. He grabbed the satchel off her shoulder. He pulled out a pistol, which he stuck in his belt, and several grenades, both fragmentation and flash-bang, dividing them between himself and Turcotte. Then he covered her face with her jacket.

Turcotte stood and checked his watch. The clock was still running. In a perverse way he was bolstered by the attempt by Katyenka to betray them. It meant there was a very good chance they were on the right path. After all the delays once they had reached Russia, this one was the most positive.

"Let's go." Turcotte strode off down the corridor. Yakov followed, leaving the bodies lying on the floor.

-270-

Colonel Tolya waited as his men pried open the elevator doors. As soon as they were far enough apart, he leaned in, shining a powerful light down. Through the cloud of dust he could see the shaft blocked by rubble. He pulled back and signaled for his men to let the door shut.

Tolya was a colonel in the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Russian army. He took his orders—and the money for him to follow them—from Katyenka, and she had been most specific about how far behind he was to follow and what he was to do.

This destruction of the elevator had not been in the instructions, but he did have a backup plan.

He had a metal case slung over his shoulder that he swung around to his chest.

He thumbed the combination to the right setting and opened the lid. He pressed the on button and an active matrix display came alive. The screen was split, and a dot glowed on both sides. The left showed horizontal displacement, while the right vertical. The object that the tracker was ranging in on was a highly radioactive isotope.

"Who has the plans?" Tolya yelled.

"I do, sir." A young engineer lieutenant hesitatingly came forward, looking out of place among the heavily armed GRU commandos clustered around Tolya.

The engineer unrolled a set of yellowing paper on Pasha's desk. "These are very old, sir. I do not know if they have been updated. The underground tunnels and chambers below the city have been the province of numerous organizations, some of which did not want others to know what they were doing."

Tolya simply stared at the lieutenant, then used a pencil to point at the plans. "North of us about three hundred meters. Down about eight hundred meters."

The engineer bit his lip as he made the mental adjustments while looking at the charts. "This shaft is listed. It

-271-

intersects a deeper cross-tunnel, here. That leads to this intersection, which runs to the point you want."

"Can we get down there?" Tolya asked.

"It will take a while. We have to go to this downshaft below the Armory in the Kremlin," the lieutenant said. "And then ..." The lieutenant paused when he realized no one was listening. Tolya was already moving.

AREA 51 TO NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE D- 10 Hours

Duncan was once more watching the desert flit by below, this time through the skin of the bouncer. "Before we go to Egypt, there is one last thing I must do,"

she informed Mualama. "There is a man I must talk to. His name is Werner von Seeckt."

Mualama nodded. "Von Seeckt was with the German party in 1942 that recovered the Airlia atomic weapon from inside the Great Pyramid."

Duncan was startled. That information had been close-held. "How did you know that?"

"I have been many places over the years in my travels," Mualama said. "The Giza Plateau I have visited many times. I believe Sir Burton knew something of the black box von Seeckt recovered."

Duncan could see the Nellis Air Force Base hospital coming up quickly as the pilot directed them to the helipad. "Why didn't he let people know?"

"He made a promise. Everything I have discovered, I have done so by tracking his movements and unraveling the riddles he left to get around his promise. The manuscript should yield more information."

Duncan shook her head. "The English and their sense of honor."

"Honor is a good thing," Mualama said. "It might be the most important thing in the path leading to truth."

-272-

Duncan was going to say something, but the bouncer touched down on the Nellis hospital helipad. "Let's go."

EASTER ISLAND

D-9 Hours, 50 Minutes

The sun shone down on Easter Island, revealing a ghastly scene. Several of the clusters of subjects the guardian had gotten from the Washington were dead. On orders from the guardian, the mech/biomanipulator checked that by sticking a needle into the bodies. There was no response. But other clusters of subjects were more promising, the bodies obviously still alive, given the cries for help and the struggling against their bonds.

But it was the living clusters that simply lay there that interested the guardian most. The mech/biomanipulator stalked up on steel legs to one group.

The imager noted the steady rise and fall of the chests. Eyes were open, but staring up, slightly averted from the sun's rays.

The guardian took the slightly averted eyes as a good sign—it meant the autonomic nervous system was still working properly, taking care of the body. It instructed the mech/biomanipulator to remove the U restraints pinning one group of this type to the ground. The ten men remained motionless, despite the restraints being removed.

Then the guardian accessed a new program, sending out commands.

One by one, the men began to stagger to their feet. One couldn't do it. He collapsed, tried to get up, then the body was still. Two made it to their feet but then crumpled to the ground and rose no more.

The other seven remained standing. With jerky motions they began moving. Over half fell on the first step. Two didn't get up. Within three minutes, all ten were down and dead.

-273-

But the guardian had learned much. It issued new instructions to its nanovirus-producing robots.

Caught in the thrall of the alien computer, Kelly Reynolds's mind was still alive, although her body was thoroughly invaded by various nanoviruses. The mind was connected to the guardian via the golden electromagnetic field, and she received information from the computer even as it extracted it from her.

Like a withering vine, she was kept against the side of the pyramid. As her mind received the same images the guardian did of the men of the Washington being tested and tossed, a tear rolled down one cheek, the only sign she was alive.

She studied the data as the guardian did. As the guardian spewed out a series of orders to the various nanoviruses that had been implanted, recovering the effective ones, directing the ineffective to be broken down and reconfigured, Kelly focused her mind, mimicking the process by which the guardian had drawn information from her.

The tears on her cheeks mingled with sweat as the extreme effort to get a coherent thought into the proper format strained her to the utmost.

It was a small command, insignificant in the flow of hundreds of thousands of decisions and orders being calculated and sent by the guardian every second. It fell into the stream, a small blip, and raced along the pathways.

NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, NEVADA D- 9 Hours, 40 Minutes

Duncan stared down at the old man in the bed for several moments as the drugs did their work and brought him into consciousness.

-274-

"You've lied to us all along." Duncan wasted no time on greetings. "Have you ever told the truth?"

"I have told you more truth than you know," von Seeckt said.

"Did you tell me the truth about the Spear of Destiny?"

"Yes."

Duncan wasn't sure whether to believe him or not, but she wanted to get to what she had just learned. "There was more to the SS, wasn't there?" Duncan asked. "A secret rite of passage, wasn't there?"

When von Seeckt didn't respond, Duncan pulled out a piece of paper. "I had your blood analyzed against the blood we drew from the hybrid STAAR personnel.

You have traces of the alien blood in you. Tell me how."

"After all these years it is still there?" von Seeckt marveled.

"How did you get it?"

"When I joined the SS, I was given an injection. To purify me, to bring me back to my roots, I was told. You tell me how much I lie—think of that lie that the Nazis perpetrated. Purity of the race, we were told, when in fact the opposite was being attempted.

"In a way, though, most people have never realized what the purity concept was about. Historians have focused on the efforts by the Nazis the eradicate the unpure in the camps, but never much on the efforts to develop the pure.

"Again, List was in on it. He had a partner named Lanz, who was a defrocked Cistercian monk. Lanz's group was called the Order of the New Templars."