Pandora's Temple (2 page)

“It’s there,” the stranger said with strange assurance, holding his thumb and index finger together against his lips as if smoking an imaginary joint.

“Where?”

“We’re missing something, el Capitán. When I figure out what it is, I’ll let you know.”

Before Hightower could respond, the seas shook violently. On deck it felt as if something had tried to suck the ship underwater, only to spit it up again. The rumbling continued, thrashing the
Aurora
from side to side like a toy boat in a bathtub. Hightower finally recovered his breath just as the rumbling ceased, leaving an eerie calm over the sea suddenly devoid of waves and wind for the first time that morning.

“This can’t be good,” said the stranger, tightening the straps on his life vest.

The ship’s pilot, a young, thick-haired Greek named Papadopoulos, looked up from the nest of LED readouts and computer-operated controls on the panel before him, as Hightower entered the bridge.

“Captain,” he said wide-eyed, his voice high and almost screeching, “seismic centers in Ankara, Cairo, and Athens are all reporting a subsea earthquake measuring just over six on the scale.”

“What’s the epi?”

“Forty miles northeast of Crete and thirty from our current position,” Papadopoulos said anxiously, a patch of hair dropping over his forehead.

“Jesus Christ,” muttered Hightower.

“Tsunami warning is high,” Papadopoulos continued, even as Hightower formed the thought himself.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, we are in for the ride of our lives!” blared the stranger, pulling on the tabs that inflated his life vest with a soft popping sound. “If I sound excited it’s ’cause I’m terrified, dudes!”

“Bring us about,” the captain ordered. “Hard back to the port of Piraeus at all the speed you can muster.”

“Yes, sir!”

Suddenly the bank of screens depicting the seafloor in a quarter-mile radius directly beneath them sprang to life. Readings flew across accompanying monitors, orientations, and graphic depictions of whatever the
Aurora
’s hydrographic equipment and underwater cameras had located appearing in real time before Hightower’s already wide eyes.

“What the hell is—”

“Found it!” said the stranger before the ship’s captain could finish.

“Found
what
?” followed Hightower immediately. “This is impossible. We’ve already been over this area. There was
nothing
down there.”

“Earthquake must’ve changed that in a big way, el Capitán. I hope you’re recording all this.”

“There’s nothing to record. It’s a blip, an echo, a mistake.”

“Or exactly what I came out here to find. Big as life to prove all the doubters wrong.”

“Doubters?”

“Of the impossible.”

“That’s what you brought us out here for, a fool’s errand?”

“Not anymore.”

The stranger watched as a central screen mounted beneath the others continued to form a shape massive in scale, an animated depiction extrapolated from all the data being processed in real time.

“Wait a minute, is that a . . . It looks like—My God, it’s some kind of
structure
!”

“You bet!”

“Intact at that depth? Impossible! No, this is all wrong.”

“Hardly, el Capitán.”

“Check the readouts, sir. According to the depth gauge, your structure’s located five hundred feet beneath the seafloor. Where I come from, they call that impos—”

Hightower’s thought ended when the
Aurora
seemed to buckle, as if it had hit a roller-coaster-like dip in the sea. The sensation was eerily akin to floating, the entire ship in the midst of an out-of-body experience, leaving Hightower feeling weightless and light-headed.

“Better fasten your seat belts, dudes,” said the stranger, eyes fastened through the bridge windows at something that looked like a waterfall pluming on the ship’s aft side.

Hightower had been at sea often and long enough to know this to be a gentle illusion belying something much more vast and terrible: in this case, a giant wave of froth that gained height as it crystallized in shape. It was accompanied by a thrashing sound that shook the
Aurora
as it built in volume and pitch, felt by the bridge’s occupants at their very cores like needles digging into their spines.

“Hard about!” Hightower ordered Papadopoulos. “Steer us into it!”

It was, he knew, the ship’s only chance for survival, or would have been, had the next moments not shown the great wave turning the world dark as it reared up before them. The
Aurora
suddenly seemed to lift into the air, climbing halfway up the height of the monster wave from a calm sea that had begun to churn mercilessly in an instant. A vast black shadow enveloped the ship in the same moment intense pressure pinned the occupants of the bridge to their chairs or left them feeling as if their feet were glued to the floor. Then there was nothing but an airless abyss dragging darkness behind it.

“Far out, man!” Hightower heard the stranger blare in the last moment before the void claimed him.

The black Mercedes SUV slid up to the entrance of the walled compound, chickens skittering from its path in the shimmering heat as it squealed to a halt. Dust hung in the air like a light curtain, adding a dull sheen to everything it touched. A pair of armed guards approached the SUV from either side of the closed gate and tapped on the blacked-out window on both the driver and passenger sides.

“I’m here to see Señor Morales,” said the driver, his face cloaked in the darkness of the interior.

“You’re early,” said the guard, hands closed over the door frame so his fingers were curled inside the cab. A thin layer of dust lifted by the breeze coated both his uniform and face.

“I know.”

“By a full day.”

The driver feigned surprise. “Really? Guess I messed up with my day planner.”

“Then we will see you tomorrow,” the guard said, backing away from the SUV as if expecting the driver to take his leave.

“Sorry, I’m not available then. But if Señor Morales would prefer I take my business elsewhere, I’m sure his competition will be most interested in that business when I visit them tomorrow instead.”

The lead guard moved up against the door again, two others with almost identical black hair and mustaches inching closer as well. “You will honor the terms of your deal.”

“Just what I came here to do, amigo. Now go check with your boss and let’s get on with it,” said the driver.

He was wearing a cream-colored suit and T-shirt that was only slightly darker. The T-shirt fit him snugly, revealing a taut torso and chest expansive enough to strain the fabric. His face was ruddy, his complexion that of a man who’d spent many hours outside, though not necessarily in the sun. His thin beard was so tightly trimmed to his skin that it could have been confused for a trick of the SUV interior’s dark shading. Other than a scar that ran through his right eyebrow and thick black hair sprinkled with a powdering of gray, his only real distinguishing feature was a pair of dark, deep-set eyes that looked like twin black holes spiraling through either side of his face.

“If Señor Morales and I have a deal, then the day shouldn’t matter,” he told the guard at his window.

“I’ll tell him you’ll be returning tomorrow.”

“In which case, I’ll be returning without this,” the driver said, turning toward the passenger seat where a smaller man who looked ten years his senior held up a briefcase that was handcuffed to his wrist.

The older man’s face was pocked with tiny scars all seeming to point toward a bent and bulbous nose that had been broken on more than one occasion. His eyes didn’t seem to blink because when they did the motion was so rapid that it might as well have not happened at all.

“Señor Morales does not like to be threatened,” the guard said, taking a step back from the vehicle. “It ruins his day.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m not threatening anyone. Now open the gate,” the man in the driver’s seat said, gazing up at the unmanned watchtowers left over from Spanish colonial times when the compound had been an active fort and these walls had proved to be the staging ground for all manner of attacks launched against native Mexicans.

The guard backed farther away from the vehicle, raising a walkie-talkie to his lips. The window slid back up, quickly vanquishing the heat in favor of the soft cool of the air-conditioning.

“This ain’t good, boss,” said Sal Belamo from the passenger seat.

“Hope you didn’t expect otherwise,” Blaine McCracken said to him, smiling ever so slightly as he opened the sunroof, the cabin flooded immediately by light. “Otherwise, somebody else would’ve taken the job.”

With a half-dozen assault rifles trained upon him, McCracken spent the next few moments carefully studying the exterior of the compound belonging to Arturo Nieves Morales, head of the Juárez drug cartel, the largest in a country dominated by them. He could see more guards armed with assault rifles posted strategically atop the walls amid the dust swirl.

“Those college kids Morales is holding should never have been down here in the first place, Sal.”

“Spring break, boss. They thought they’d be safe in some resort in Cabo.”

McCracken laid his hands on the steering wheel and leaned back. “They got taken outside a nightclub, lured into a van by some girls we now know were Morales’s plants. Not exactly what you’d expect from honor students.”

“Booze will do that to you.”

“I wouldn’t know, Sal. These are honor students who seem to lead the world in community service efforts. Their fraternity built a house for those Habitat for Humanity folks—a whole damn house, for God’s sake.”

“Sounds like you’re taking this personal, boss.”

“They’re good kids who didn’t deserve getting snatched in this sinkhole of a country.”

“Parents couldn’t raise the ransom?”

“What’s the difference? You pay Morales, he just asks for more. And if you don’t keep paying, you start getting your kid back one piece at a time.”

“Uh-oh,” from Belamo.

“What?”

“I’ve heard that tone before.”

“Not lately.”

“Doesn’t matter, boss. You’re picking up just where you left off, and only one way this goes, you ask me.”

“What’s that?”

“With a lot of bodies left behind.”

“So long as none of them belong to the hostages, Sal.”

“I thought you were out,” Henry Folsom said to Blaine McCracken seven days before.

Folsom had the look of a man born in a button-down shirt. Hair neatly slicked back, horn-rimmed glasses, and youthful features that would make him appear forty forever. There was something in his eyes, though, that unsettled McCracken a bit, a constant shifting of his gaze as if there was something he didn’t want McCracken to see lurking there.

“Most people think I’m dead,” McCracken said, folding his arms tightly across his chest.

Folsom shifted, as if to widen the space between them at the table. “All the same, I was glad when your name came up in conversation.”

“Really? What kind of conversation was that?”

“Independent contractors capable of pulling off the impossible.”

“I haven’t pulled off anything, impossible or otherwise, for a couple years now.”

“Are you saying you’re not interested?”

“I’m here, aren’t I? But my guess is I wouldn’t be, if you hadn’t pitched this job elsewhere.”

“To more traditional authorities, you mean.”

“Younger, anyway,” said McCracken.

Folsom seemed to smirk. “The hostages are fraternity brothers from Brown University. One of their parents is a top immigration lawyer. That’s why this ended up on my desk.”

“You know him?”

“Nope, but I know you,” Folsom said, folding his arms tightly and flashing another smirk. “I did my master’s thesis on the true birth of covert operations, contrasting the work of the World War II–bred OSS with the Vietnam-era Operation Phoenix where CIA-directed assassins plucked off the North Vietnamese cadre one at a time.” Folsom leaned forward, canting his shoulders forward as if he were about to bow. “I’ve been reading about you for twenty years now.”

“There’s nothing written about me.”

Folsom came up just short of a wink. “I know.”

McCracken had met him in the F Street Bistro in the State Plaza Hotel, a pleasant enough venue with cheery light and a slate of windows overlooking the street he instinctively avoided. McCracken had arrived first, as was his custom, and staked out a table in as close to a darkened corner as the place had to offer. He’d used this location in the past because of its status as one of Washington’s best-kept secrets. Once he sat down, though, the room began to fill up around him, every table occupied within minutes and an army of waiters scurrying between them. McCracken found all the bustle distinctly unsettling and nursed a ginger ale that was almost all water and ice by the time Folsom arrived.

“You don’t drink,” Folsom noted.

“Never. So who in the special-ops community did you call first?”

“Maybe I’ve just always wanted to see your work firsthand.”

“That’s funny, Hank. A sense of humor makes you a rare commodity these days, what with so many ex-operators running around with their hands out. Guys who could be my kids. I turn sixty in a couple weeks, Hank. That puts me a step beyond even father figure.”

“Normal channels had to be bypassed here,” Folsom told him. “Can’t send the Rangers or SEALs into Mexico with a new trade agreement about to be inked.”

“And since you always wanted to work with me . . .”

“I needed someone who could get the job done, McCracken. That immigration lawyer I just mentioned? He does work for us from time to time.”

“Who’s ‘us,’ Hank?”

“The State Department, who else?”

McCracken held Folsom’s gaze until the younger man broke it. “If you say so, Hank.”

“Name your price. It will be considered nonnegotiable.”

McCracken chuckled at the promise. “First time for everything, I guess.”