Pandora's Temple (17 page)

Her mind cleared now, Katie used that final chance to lurch up out of her chair and close her hands on the basement’s single dangling lightbulb. Steeling herself against the pain, she compressed the bulb between her hands, shattering it and driving some of the thin shards into her palms as the basement was plunged into darkness.

Men yelled, men shouted. Footsteps pounded the floor. Shinzo Asahara’s voice shouted orders in Japanese, and Katie felt shapes converging on her as hands flailed out, brushing against her clothes.

But she’d already memorized the exact location of the stairs from her chair. Twenty-one steps by her estimation. Katie kept her pace steady and measured through the darkness, nothing to give away her position to men likely trained in the martial arts and thus accustomed to fighting in difficult conditions.

Sounds of pursuit had begun to close upon her when her hand grasped a wooden railing and she rushed up the steps, bursting through a door into what looked like some kind of storage room. Another door marked Exit was just to her right and she surged through it into a back alley and the stormy night beyond.

She felt the rain wash the blood from her hands, realizing only then how much they hurt. Katie burst into an all-out sprint to the nearest street. She sped across it and swung right immediately down another, safe from her pursuers for now and struck by a dread fear of the enormity of whatever the
Venture
had uncovered six miles below the surface.

“. . . I will take the rest of the world with me . . .”

Katie heard Shinzo Asahara’s words in her mind again, as she disappeared into the night.

“What do you mean it’s gone?” Captain Merch said from the bridge of the Coast Guard cutter
Nero
, as they steamed toward the
Deepwater Venture
’s position.

“We’ve finally got the satellite feeds back up, sir,” his exec told him. “I checked the positioning myself. Nothing. The
Venture
’s gone, lost to the sea.”

Merch nonetheless raised the binoculars to his eyes, peering at the sun burning through the thick mist, the storm’s residue still clinging to the surface. As a result, the sea gave up nothing, and they were still a mile out from the rig’s coordinates.

“No sign of
anything
?” Merch groped, letting the binoculars dangle again.

The exec shook his head. “The Gulf got it all, sir, every last piece and bone.”

“We’d best be sure. Keep us on course. Full power.”

It was only last month that Merch had taken command of the
Nero
, part of a new generation of Sentinel class patrol boats that were easily the most advanced for their time of any the Coast Guard had enjoyed since being conceived by Alexander Hamilton around 1790.

“Captain,” the exec barked suddenly, “sonar’s got a hit!”

“Debris?”

“No, sir, it’s moving. Straight, I say again, straight for our position.”

“Sound the general alarm,” Merch ordered, not about to take any chances. “Go to battle stations.”

The
Nero
sliced through the mist, riding effortlessly over the choppy seas. Since the storm was clearing from the west, visibility was already increasing and Merch caught the first hint of the sun’s dawn rays above. Then, just like that, the mist was gone and the chop with it, replaced by a frighteningly calm sea empty with the exception of an object coming straight for them from a thousand yards out now.

“Captain, is that a—”

“Yes,” Merch said, before the exec could finish, “I believe it is.”

Hours before, amid the storm-swept darkness, McCracken had just been about to drop below the surface to avoid whatever hunk of rig debris was sweeping straight for them.

“Wait, Blainey,” Wareagle said, halting him. “It’s the life pod.”

He spoke just as the orb seemed to halt itself in the waves, a top hatch opening enough for Captain Seven to pop his upper body out.

“Somebody call for a taxi?”

They’d ridden out the rest of the storm within the life pod’s ample confines, using its small engine and controls to avoid the harshest swells as best they could and then following the course they expected the Coast Guard to take to the
Venture
’s former position as soon as the seas allowed. Those seas had ravaged Captain Seven’s computers, but all the most pertinent data had already been uploaded to the mainframe and he’d somehow managed to salvage the samples he’d taken from the
Venture
’s freshly reformed superstructure.

“You’re something, Captain,” a soaked McCracken said, shoulders sheathed in a blanket.

“You should see me when I’m stoned.”

“I have, plenty of times. Remember?”

Captain Seven’s eyes had gone down at that, his tone turning uncharacteristically somber. “Lots of people talk about that war now, but almost none of them have any idea what the fuck it was really like. Or about.”

“Some days even I don’t remember what it was about. But I guess all wars are like that in one way or another.”

Captain Seven sucked in a hefty breath, as if he were smoking from an imaginary bowl, his twisted tangle of graying hair having dried into patches with the texture of steel wool. “I saw you at the Wall once,” he said suddenly, referring to the black carved granite shape of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. “Both of you.”

“I know.”

“You saw me, too?”

McCracken nodded.

“Should have come over. I was beyond stoned at the time. What was your excuse?”

“Respect for privacy, yours as well as mine. Besides, I already had plenty of company, even if their names weren’t there,” said McCracken, turning toward Johnny Wareagle, whose gaze was locked out a small window facing back toward the last remnants of the
Venture
. “What’s eating you, Indian?”

“I haven’t felt anything this powerful in a very long time, Blainey.”

“With good reason, my friend,” said Captain Seven. “Because there
isn’t
anything more powerful than what took that rig down, not in this world anyway. It’s what I was looking for in the Mediterranean five years ago and may have found here. It could mince up and scramble the entire world the same way it did the
Venture
. Mix up the contents of the planet in the spin cycle and pour out whatever’s left. Forget a Level Six event, this is a genuine Level Six Thousand. Only one problem.”

“What’s that?” McCracken asked him.

“What’s responsible doesn’t exist.”

“You’ve found it at last, Mr. Roy.”

Pierce’s report had gone on to detail as much as was currently known about the inexplicable fate of the
Deepwater Venture
, updated hours later to include the fact that the rig had been lost to the sea.

Disappointment over losing all chance to examine the rig and prove his theories conclusively had first stolen Sebastian Roy’s sleep and then left it racked by nightmares. He tossed and turned, a cold sweat covering his skin even in the oxygen-rich, normally comfortable chill of his bedroom.

The nightmares had started with a trip through time, back to the day of the explosion and fire. His entire family together outside of Stuttgart, Germany, on the grounds of what had once been a nuclear power plant. In his career Roy had been blessed above all else with foresight, his gift of prescience fueling his meteoric rise to the stratosphere of business. Foretelling the future of energy was impossible for most in an industry riddled by misjudgments and cutthroat competition.

In the dream he saw himself addressing a crowd devoid of faces, mere shapeless forms before him, explaining that Germany and all industrialized countries would someday turn away from nuclear energy to less dangerous alternatives. This was because a catastrophic accident, a meltdown, was inevitable. So he explained how he had gone against the grain of energy investment by putting huge resources into plants specializing in fossil fuel development and enhancement. The dinosaurs of the energy industry. Huge, blackened anachronistic assemblages of steel beams and concrete smoke stacks belching poison into the air.

“Germany was ahead of the curve when it came to reducing its dependence on the seventeen nuclear plants helping to power the country,” he told the faceless mass before him who, he realized in the dream, sat rigid and motionless like toy figures fit into the chairs. “So I elected to build my flagship, fully modernized fossil fuel plant on the grounds of the country’s oldest nuclear facility that was shut down for good after coming only minutes from a potential meltdown in 2004.”

Moments later the first explosion sounded, a blast furnace swallowing the world. His family was around him and then, once again in what felt like a recorded replay, there was only smoke and desperate people racing blindly about in search of escape. Roy heard horrible rasping coughs amid the screams, himself in motion now jostled by panicked shapes slamming into him on both sides, stealing his orientation in the smoke-ravaged darkness.

The moments that followed had given birth to Sebastian Roy in his new incarnation. The media branded him a tragic hero for what he and witnesses said happened next, when Roy managed to extricate himself from the throngs of the desperate and screaming and reach an exit where a security team pulled him the rest of the way out.

“My family, my family!” he screamed at them.

They shook their heads grimly
, one of the news stories said,
and Roy rushed back into the fire in search of his son, daughter, and wife. He battled the surge of bodies before him, screaming their names until his throat was scorched and he realized he could no longer breathe. Saved only when other bodies piled atop his, sparing him from the flames and the worst of the heat
.

Roy woke up in a hospital bed swathed in bandages and fighting off the first of the infections that seemed sure to kill him in days, if not hours.

“Punishment,” he’d muttered to first a nurse and then a doctor in the hospital, his voice barely rising over a whisper. The pain he felt was intense, constant, resisting the attempts of painkillers to make any more than a dent in it. “I’m being punished for my sins.”

He’d asked them for a priest to whom to confess those sins, certain he was going to die. When the priest came, Roy could sense his revulsion at what he heard, the man struggling to offer him final absolution. Sebastian Roy might not have been a religious man, but he nonetheless felt the need to share a truth he had shared with no other. Then, shortly after Roy made what was deemed a miraculous recovery, the priest disappeared. The doctor and the nurse followed soon afterward.

Meanwhile, Roy Industries had managed to retain its status as an industry stalwart. The stock dropped precipitously at first, but it recovered just as fast when the world learned Sebastian Roy was recovering and had every intention of returning to the helm of his company. Above all else, he could not let the tragedy deter his plans for the future, especially when sabotage was found to be the cause of the explosions and resulting fire. The authorities called it terrorism, likely on the part of radical environmentalists, which only strengthened Roy’s personal resolve. Destroying them meant destroying their cause.

He would shove it in his enemies’ faces. Use his newfound status as a truly tragic figure to help him build hundreds, even thousands, of fossil fuel plants all over the world, all of them belching black hydrocarbon smoke into the atmosphere to stain the air and dirty the clouds. Clean energy meant little to him; the future he saw was one where the world wanted heat, light, and convenient transportation above all else and wouldn’t care about the environmental price paid as long as their switches worked and they got where they wanted to go.

Then came the tsunami-caused disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan. Suddenly demand for fossil fuel replacement facilities, a market now cornered by Roy Industries, exploded. Rival energy companies imploded under the strain and poor planning to be sucked up and absorbed at Roy’s whim for pennies on the dollar. Once a powerful force in the industry, Sebastian Roy became the prevailing one to whom former rivals were beholden if they wanted to share in his production of the gigawatts that were far more valuable than any single resource in controlling the world.

Still, that wasn’t enough. He wanted more, some ultimate source of power that would render all others obsolete even as it brought meaning to the loss of his family. And now, because of what had happened a half world away in the Gulf of Mexico, he found himself on the verge of finding that source at long last.

Roy used his call button to summon Pierce as soon as the nightmares had relinquished their hold on him.

“You thought I was crazy when I told you what I was after, didn’t you?” he said.

“I thought this was a fool’s errand, yes, Mr. Roy.”

“And what do you think now, Pierce?”

“Nothing. Because I’m too scared.”

“All great achievements require sacrifice,” Roy reminded him. “There is nothing to fear from that, no more anyway than that experienced by those involved in the Manhattan Project, the men who changed the world forever at Alamogordo.”

“With all due respect, Mr. Roy, none of your theories accounted for whatever happened to the
Deepwater Venture
.”

“Going back to the Manhattan Project,” Roy told him, “there was a letter circulated by some of the foremost scientists in the world claiming an atomic detonation could create a chain reaction that might destroy the entire planet. Had those behind the project heeded their warning, we never would’ve developed the bomb. Mutual deterrence would have gone out the window, the Cold War progressing down an entirely different route. Just imagine, Pierce.”

“I have, I am.”

“We must proceed, as the Manhattan Project did, in spite of the risks. Because, make no mistake about it, what we are working toward here has the potential to change the world in even more profound ways.”

“It can’t be harnessed, Mr. Roy. Even those who’ve been trumpeting its existence for decades have no idea how to contain it.”