Pandora's Temple (16 page)

If falling hunks and jagged fragments of twisted steel from the collapsing rig didn’t kill them first, that is.

For now there was only the darkness, the raging waters below, and the storm itself. McCracken could feel its force buckling his knees, as he and Wareagle hoisted Captain Seven atop the makeshift slide, holding their collective breath when they shoved him forward to whisk him on his way.

They could hear Captain Seven wailing, riding the slide the way Slim Pickens rode an atomic bomb in the final scene of
Dr. Strangelove
. He disappeared from view, swallowed by the night, the storm giving up no trace of him again.

“You’re next, Blainey,” Wareagle said over the howling winds and pelting rain.

“Since when?”

“Since my weight could be too much for the arm to handle and one of us has to get our findings back to shore.”

“For Baz, then,” McCracken conceded, easing himself up onto the slide.

“For Baz,” Wareagle acknowledged.

And then McCracken pushed himself into motion.

The plummet was like nothing he’d ever experienced before. Not the high-altitude, low-opening parachute drops from five miles up. Not drops into the ocean in full battle gear. Not even the feeling of the g-forces of a space shuttle launch a generation before upon his return, at least unofficially, to government service.

The makeshift slide’s drop approached forty-five degrees. But gravity kept McCracken braced to the steel, arms tucked by his sides to avoid slipping off and eyes squeezed open to the storm to steady his plunge into the water once the end of the slide came up.

Ultimately, it came much quicker than he’d expected, no more than the length of one desperately held breath. He had barely registered he was coming upon the end of his ride when the blackness of the night welcomed him, followed almost immediately by the crashing waves of the sea. He felt himself plunging beneath frigid waters and then clawed back to the surface only to be smacked by a swell. Salt water flooded his lungs and he hacked it out with the taste of fuel oil lingering in his mouth. The surface was thick with dark drilling mud that smelled sour and spoiled. McCracken finally found his breath just as the storm-fueled currents slammed into him again. A sweep of his gaze found nothing until he glimpsed Johnny Wareagle fighting the waves toward him.

“Captain!” McCracken yelled out, the storm swallowing his cry. “Captain!” he wailed again anyway.

Wareagle somehow managed to reach him just as a grinding screech found both their ears. They looked up to see the last of the
Deepwater Venture
toppling over above them, its steel carcass seeming to tilt straight in their direction as its remaining three columns collapsed into the sea. They dove into the pounding swells instinctively, both feeling the vibration of thousands of tons of steel smacking the wave-ravaged surface, the sensation grinding their teeth together even with their breaths held.

McCracken had seldom known fear like he felt in that moment, the very real fear that reaching the surface again would be impossible. That whatever terrible secrets this rig had held would remain just that and the death of Paul Basmajian would never be avenged. Recharged by that resolve, McCracken drove himself toward the surface, coming up in a valley between two mountainous waves to find Wareagle close enough to reach out for. He grabbed Johnny’s life vest at the epaulet just before the heavy seas splashed more of the refuse from the drilling mud into his face, making it feel as if it was raining gravel.

“Any sign of the captain?” McCracken shouted over the storm.

Wareagle shook his head, his long black hair freed of its ponytail and pasted across his face. The
Venture
had seemingly broken apart on impact with the sea, the scattered pieces of it turned into potential weapons set in motion by the waves. Even if they managed to avoid that threat, the churning seas seemed destined to take them well before the Coast Guard could mount any rescue operation.

Wareagle had grabbed a twisted, mangled husk of steel and drawn it between them to better support their weight and ride the waves as best they could. Then McCracken spotted something that looked like a glowing orb slicing through the waves and driving rain, coming straight for them.

Katie DeMarco awoke to the pungent sour scents of must and mold, aware almost immediately her captors had brought her to a basement. She snapped all the way upright, nearly falling off the stiff wooden chair on which she’d been placed, her arms and legs both unbound. Her clothes, wet with both rain and perspiration, stuck to the chair, and the basement air felt too thick and steamy to breathe.

How much time did that mean had passed? Not enough for her clothes to dry was the only conclusion Katie could draw. Her head was cloudy, her vision slowly sharpening as the grogginess receded to the sight of several figures shrouded by the murky light before her. There was no pain until she moved her eyes, at which point the mere motion sent a cascade of light flashing before her to mirror the sudden burst of agony. Her head felt heavy, a bowling ball atop her neck, and the residue of whatever drug her captors had used to knock her out had left her mouth so bone dry, her tongue felt pasted to its roof.

A single bulb dangled almost directly overhead, the only one she spotted in the dingy confines. None of the men around her moved, none spoke.

“Who are you? Where am I?”

Katie’s words echoed in her own ears, sounding as lame to her as they must have to her captors, when a smaller figure appeared amid the others, gliding through the shadows as if comfortable in their midst and stopping close enough to Katie’s chair for her to realize he was Japanese. His skin was porcelain smooth, seeming to shine even in the faint light. He smelled of musky talcum powder or, perhaps, lightly scented cologne. He looked at her, not seeming to blink, his eyes as detached and focused as a camera’s lens.

“Katie DeMarco,” he said in thinly accented English. “What is your real name?”

Katie remained silent.

“There is no such person as Katie DeMarco. You are fortunate the company responsible for the
Deepwater Venture
did not check your credentials as closely as we did.”

“Who’s
we
?” Katie heard herself ask.

She thought she saw the Japanese man smile. “What do you know of the
Venture
’s true purpose,
Katie DeMarco
?” he asked, her name spoken in a lower tone with an edge of contempt.

“It’s an oil rig. What do you think its purpose was?” she shot back, forcing contempt into her own voice as if that might have made her sound braver.

“
Was
an oil rig. Now . . .” The Japanese man finished his comment with a shrug. “Tell me what you know, Katie DeMarco, the truth.”

“I don’t know anything for sure.”

The Japanese seemed to perk up a bit at that. “But you know
something
, don’t you?”

“I know the crew was killed. I know the rig was destroyed,” she said, trying to figure out the Japanese man’s part in all this. He wasn’t part of Ocean Bore, meaning he had nothing to do with the men who’d pursued her through New Orleans, those who were behind Twist’s death or the murder of the WorldSafe team in Greenland. So who was he and what did he want exactly?

“The crew was killed? You think that’s all that happened?” he snapped at her.

“It’s enough,” Katie said, her mind still not totally clear.

“If you have no answers for me, Katie DeMarco, you serve no purpose. Oil rigs drill for oil. There was no oil where the
Venture
was drilling. Ocean Bore was in search of something else entirely. I know this because I am in search of the very same thing, and I believe you know what it is and where the
Venture
found it.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“And yet you fled the rig at the most opportune time. You would expect me to believe that was just coincidence, that you didn’t have some idea of what was to come?”

“I didn’t. That’s the truth.”

“No. Since you fled the rig just before disaster struck,” the Japanese man continued, “I must assume you suspected what was about to happen. That means you know more about what I seek than you are saying.”

“I’ve told you everything I know.”

“You think me a fool, Katie DeMarco?” the Japanese man asked. “You think I don’t realize you infiltrated that rig for your own purpose? You think I don’t know you must have caught on to what the
Venture
was really up to?” He took another slight step forward. “And now you will tell me what you know about the
Venture
’s true mission.”

“I don’t know how many different ways I can say it: I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

At that, the Japanese man edged yet closer to her, moving into the reach of the single dangling bulb. Even the dim light seemed to bother his eyes, making them narrow. He dabbed at them with a handkerchief as if they were watering, and Katie noticed his left hand was clothed in some kind of thin, black mitten.

“My name is Shinzo Asahara, Katie DeMarco.”

Katie tensed, her empty stomach quivering.

“I see that name is familiar to you.”

“Your father was Shoho Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo.”

Asahara studied her briefly. “You know of him.”

“I know he was a murderer, leader of fanatics.”

Asahara stiffened. “You would be wise not to mock me.”

“I’ve done nothing to you!”

He grinned. “That’s better.”

Katie eyed him questioningly.

“There is fear in your voice now. That tells me you understand the depths of your plight. ‘Shinrikyo’ means ‘supreme truth,’ Katie DeMarco. And right now the only truth that matters is what the
Venture
uncovered holds the means for Aum Shinrikyo to fulfill its destiny.”

“The end of the world,” Katie said as much to herself as Asahara.

Aum Shinrikyo was a doomsday cult centered in Japan and founded in 1987 by Shinzo’s father, Shoho, the partially blind son of a tatami straw mat maker. He led an ordinary life until a journey to the Himalayas to study Buddhism and Hinduism left him a profoundly changed man, and he returned to Japan obsessed with the coming end of the world. More to the point, he had taken it as his God-given duty to see that end wrought by his own hand.

In pursuit of that goal, he founded his Aum Shinrikyo cult to engage in a final fight leading up to Armageddon. Toward that end, Aum Shinrikyo established a number of chemical factories and stockpiled various chemicals in preparation for at least nine biological attacks on different installations in Japan. Targets had included the legislature, the imperial palace, and the US base at Yokosuka. Cult members sprayed microbes and germ toxins from rooftops and convoys of trucks.

With one exception, though, all the attacks failed; and the one that succeeded led to what the world believed was the cult’s ultimate demise, once Shoho Asahara was arrested and tried for spreading sarin nerve gas in a Tokyo subway station in 1995. The gas killed thirteen passengers and injured over five thousand. But if his technicians had not made errors in preparation and dispersal of the gas, thousands of innocent subway patrons would have been killed and tens of thousands injured instead.

Katie had thought the resulting trials and imprisonments of the cult members, including Shoho Asahara himself, had ended Aum Shinrikyo forever. But the fact that Asahara’s son was standing before her now clearly indicated otherwise.

The end of the world
, Katie thought again.

“I want the means to bring my father’s vision to fruition,” Shinzo Asahara told her, “the means that oil rig uncovered six miles beneath the surface of the sea. I want the very same thing you must have, and I want to know what you learned of it while on board.”

“I can’t help you. I don’t know what
it
was that they uncovered, other than it wasn’t oil.”

Asahara tilted his head slightly to the side and regarded her closer. “Then you’re going to die, Katie DeMarco, slowly and painfully unless you tell me what I need to know,” he said as the man nearest her chair eased a knife from inside his jacket.

The knife looked to Katie like a smaller version of the samurai sword one of her rescuers had wielded in the restaurant earlier that day. Clearly just as sharp and managing to shine even in the dingy basement’s meager light.

“Not much of an incentive,” Katie managed, still eyeing the blade.

Shinzo Asahara continued to regard her closely. “Who are you really, Katie DeMarco?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Only that you should be much more frightened than you are. Pleading with me, begging for your life.”

“Maybe you’re just not as scary as you think you are.”

“Who are you?”

“Why are you wearing that mitten on your hand?”

“Would you like to see?”

“Why don’t you tell me if it has anything to do with your father and Aum Shinrikyo wanting to destroy the world? Is that your supreme truth?”

“The world is already destroying itself, Katie DeMarco. My father was driven by his core beliefs, the enlightenment he encountered and passed on to me. I share those beliefs along with a desire to finish his work to spite the world that has martyred him. What the
Venture
uncovered can give me the means I need to finish the job.” Asahara held up his left hand, the one cloaked by the dark mitten. “You want to know why I wear this? To hide a souvenir left from the last time I encountered the very force you know full well that the
Venture
found.”

“What force?”

“Ignorance renders you useless to me. If you have nothing to tell me, our business is done and so is your life.”

“So you’re a murderer just like your father, and you’ll die just like he did. I believe he was hanged.”

Asahara’s expression flattened, his breathing steadied in resignation as he stepped closer into the thin spray of light, ignoring the pain it sent shooting through eyes he fought to keep open.

“We have all made sacrifices for our beliefs,” he said, starting to tug at the tight mitten covering his left hand. “My father paid his price for his beliefs, just as I have paid mine. The difference is when I go, I will take the rest of the world with me. One final chance, Katie DeMarco, one final chance to aid me in that task.”