Pandora's Temple (21 page)

Pathos Verdes had begun the process by modeling the temple after palaces of legend, those he had never laid eyes upon himself but heard described by scribes and tellers of tales from ages past. But his vision of finely etched narrowing layers topped by a majestic dome was more than an amalgamation of his accumulated knowledge. He could not say exactly from where the design ideas had sprung, nor why exactly he had decided to build the grand façade to the scale of giants and the gods themselves, with doors fashioned from polished stone no man could open on his own.

No mortal man anyway.

Inside its vast octagonal walls, Verdes had laid floors of marble speckled with bronze dust and added pillars that connected the multitiered levels contained beneath the dome. The walls and grand stairs were fashioned of limestone pulled from quarries as far away as ships could sail. Verdes set crews of workers to polish the limestone to a bright hue under both sun and moon before it was set into place inside. His sculptors, meanwhile, were busy fashioning marble life-sized statues of the gods drawn from strange visions that had come to the builder on the few nights when he found sleep. This temple was as much homage to them as anything. It gave Pathos Verdes pause long enough to dapple his cheeks with tears, until the warmth of accomplishment was lost in the messenger’s final instruction to him:

Any mortal with knowledge of the temple must take that secret to his grave.

Any rejoicing he might have done or pleasure he may have felt was lost to that. Verdes ordered his foremen to kill the final workmen who’d survived the ordeal of the build and then poisoned those same foremen during a feast to celebrate the project’s completion. That night, he and his wife slept inside the temple walls upon its marble floor, awaking to the sight of a large jar centered beneath the nave. The jar was ivory colored and rose to heights nearly that of a man. Pathos Verdes had long been gifted with the ability to identify the composition of an object by sight, but this jar was smoother than any surface he had ever known while giving off no reflection whatsoever. Similarly, the jar appeared to be seamless, as if it had been poured out instead of fashioned or molded.

Just like the great temple Verdes had finally completed.

He approached the jar reverently and touched the surface, pulling his fingers back immediately. The jar had felt fiery hot and icy cold at the same time. Still his fingers bore no wound or mark. Some form of markings covered the jar’s oblong center, symbols like none he’d ever seen before and could not decipher. Verdes stood there and recalled the messenger’s instructions to him so many years ago:

“There is a weapon greater than any ever known to gods or mortal man. This weapon has the power to control the world. Or destroy it, to kill even a god. As the greatest builder of our time, your king orders you, Pathos Verdes, to construct a temple capable of containing this weapon so it remains protected from mortal hands.”

And now, with the temple complete, this jar must contain that very weapon.

Verdes felt his eyes mist with tears, too awestruck to wield a hand to wipe them. In that rare moment of sanity, he fully grasped the scope of his accomplishment and the rewards to be visited upon him for his labor.

Any mortal with knowledge of the temple must take that secret to his grave.

He drew his wife in close against him and plunged a knife deep into her back as he held her. He felt the last of her life ebb away and then eased her body into the crypt he had prepared in anticipation of that moment.

And in that moment, his final depths of madness yielded the name of the grand temple. The gods, whose bidding he had so faithfully done, wished the temple to be christened after the first woman known to man: Pandora.

Pandora’s Temple.

“Named for Pandora herself, dudes,” Captain Seven continued, “a woman Zeus ordered Hephaestus to fashion out of clay, or some shit like that, to punish mankind for Prometheus stealing fire from the gods. According to the myth, she was entrusted with a jar and told never to open it. But curiosity got the better of the bitch, so off came the lid and out flew all the evils of mankind, unleashed on the world. Then she seals it again, leaving only hope inside, so the equation never got balanced. At some point the jar got mistranslated as a box, but you get the point.”

“You’re saying it wasn’t a myth at all,” McCracken concluded. “You’re saying Pandora’s jar really exists.”

“You realize how crazy this all sounds,” Folsom said, shaking his head.

“If you’d seen what we did on board the
Venture
, I believe you’d feel different, B-rat. A Level Six event, remember? And no more nuts than that alien invasion you’ve been prepping for.”

Folsom blew out some breath.

“You weren’t in the Mediterranean five years ago, B-rat. You didn’t see what I saw there either.”

“Which was?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Could have been the temple. Tsunami got me before I could be sure.”

“A tsunami,” Folsom repeated. “And how long before you were rescued?”

“A day or so.”

“A day or more at sea with no food or water after surviving a shipwreck? Doesn’t lend much credibility to your recollection.”

Folsom’s comment was enough to bring Captain Seven up close to him, right in his face. “Let me tell you something, B-rat. I might be a burnout, but as these boys’ll tell you, when it comes to the job, I got the clearest head known to man and I’m only telling you what the cameras showed. So kiss my ass.”

“You try looking for the temple again?”

“You bet. Only whatever it was I caught a glimpse of before the tsunami hit was gone. Like it flat out disappeared again. Don’t ask me how. Dudes who sent me there told me to pack it in, so I did. Didn’t want to give me the time I needed to find what I knew was down there somewhere.”

Folsom backed off, arms raised as McCracken moved in between them. “Assuming you’re right,” he said to the captain, “how exactly did the temple end up under the Mediterranean Sea?”

“Another part of the story, if you want to hear it.”

“No,” snapped Folsom. “I’ve heard enough.”

“Then hear this, B-rat: How many atoms of dark matter you think it took to remake the
Venture
at the molecular level? Normal explosions generate incredible heat and percussion. The result is char, melting, debris, pretty much utter destruction at the physical level, which means the molecular level too. There was no heat associated with what happened on the
Venture
, no percussion, no searing, no residue—nothing. The dark matter atoms released by the drill encountered traditional matter atoms and, with apologies to the coneheads at CERN, you got your big bang, all right. For an immeasurable shadow of an instant, too brief to be recorded by any device in existence, the
Venture
, and everything on board it, ceased to exist in the sense that its atoms no longer coalesced to form recognizable matter. When they coalesced again, you ended up with what we found.”

“You said as much on the rig,” McCracken recalled, “like somebody dumped the
Venture
into a blender and poured its contents back out.”

“Now go back to your question about how many atoms of dark matter were in the collision. I don’t know that, but what I do know is that if you double whatever that amount was, you’d have a tsunami the size of a skyscraper destroying the entire Gulf coast. Double it again and you’d have a blast that would dump New Orleans and every city within a hundred miles of the southern coast into the same blender that turned the
Venture
into a molecular mess. Get up to ten, maybe twenty times and you’d create a cosmic blast capable of ripping a hole in the atmosphere, kind of like popping a balloon. Then it’s sayonara to life on Earth.” Captain Seven settled back with a deep breath, strangely at ease, his argument with Folsom seemingly forgotten. “Don’t you just love this shit?”

McCracken had thought the captain’s question was posed to him, then realized the captain had aimed it at Johnny Wareagle. “Looks like you’ve got something on your mind, Indian.”

“Ancient tales from my people and other tribes dating back thousands of years tell of a race of ‘star beings’ who were marooned on Earth and sought a way to return to their planet. Versions of the tale differ on virtually anything, with the exception of the star beings finding the means they needed to leave.” Wareagle hesitated as if to collect his thoughts. “There are drawings, Blainey, of something being drawn from the very core of the planet to fuel vast ships that have the look of spacecraft.”

“You think these aliens used dark matter to get out of Dodge.”

“I think history speaks to us of the inexplicable or impossible that we choose to brand as legends and wives’ tales. But the fact is the ancient legends and myths I’m speaking of weren’t limited to the Hopi in the American desert Southwest. Identical tales and drawings sprang from the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayans. Separate continents with the same stories occurring at the same time on each.”

“Chariots of the Gods, dudes,” chimed in Captain Seven. “I’ve heard they were not averse to toking up, either. In fact, I heard those Indian tribes introduced them to the original wild-grown, badass weed and peyote. Folks could’ve left anytime they wanted to but chose the natural high instead. Didn’t fly the coop until supply ran low. Or maybe they packed that shit into their cargo holds and flew off to distribute it through the final frontier where no man had gone before. Original fucking drug cartels from that perspective.”

“So these star beings used dark matter to . . .”

“. . . power up their flying saucers, or whatever they were driving, and get the fuck off our then primitive planet. Come to think of it, this is still a primitive planet. Until they make weed legal, we are truly in a bad state.”

“There a point here somewhere, Captain?”

“Plan B, MacNuts. Before the big fella’s star beings could pump dark matter gas into their engines, they’d have to figure out a way to contain it, since therein lies the real problem that’s stopped the kindergartners at CERN from getting any place in a hurry. How can you isolate and study something you can’t even keep hold of for more than a nanosecond in any truly measurable quantity? You can see what I’m getting at here.”

“Not really. I prefer to leave the tech stuff to the experts,” McCracken told him.

“Then kneel before me and listen. We figure out how those ancient flyboys contained dark matter and we can keep what the
Venture
found from blowing up the planet. That means I’m headed out,” he finished, rising and cracking his knuckles.

“Where to, Captain?”

“Greece, scene of the crime. Finish the work I started five years ago and find Pandora’s Temple once and for all.”

“I need you to finish something else for me before you leave,” Blaine said. “A couple of things actually starting with all e-mails originating from the
Deepwater Venture
referencing supplies.”

“Sounds pretty broad, MacNuts.”

“Focus on ordnance.”

“That I can do. What else?”

Before McCracken could respond, Folsom looked up from a text message he’d just received. “We’ve got her!”

“Who?” McCracken asked him.

“There was a woman, an assistant to the operations manager, who fled the
Venture
yesterday morning just a few hours before your expert’s big bang struck. She’s now in the custody of the New Orleans police.” Folsom held the grainy picture displayed on his BlackBerry out for McCracken to see. “Don’t suppose you recognize her?”

“Come with me, ma’am,” the police officer said, holding the cell door open.

He was a black man with a tight-fitting cap covering his bald dome and an accent that sounded lightly Cajun. The building’s heat had brought a light sheen of sweat to the surface of his skin although it felt cold and dank to Katie down here in the basement.

Katie rose from the concrete slab seat of the holding cell in the bowels of the New Orleans Police Department headquarters on North Rampart Street.

“Where we going?” she asked the officer.

“Just come with me.”

He took tight hold of Katie at the elbow and steered her on. One flight of stairs up and a single corridor length later, she found herself inside what looked like the same interrogation room where she was questioned hours before by a detective named Hurst. Her answers had been cryptic, not about to give anything away with no clear idea of how the police had found her or why they’d been looking. Katie hadn’t asked for a lawyer because there seemed to be no point in involving yet another outside party in the muddle of the past day. She needed to collect her thoughts, buy time, and determine who out there might be able to help her.

Katie surmised from Detective Hurst’s questions, along with his producing a grainy picture of her taken from a dock-mounted security camera, that her arrest had everything to do with her flight from the
Deepwater Venture
and nothing to do with all that had transpired since. No questions were posed about Japanese kidnappers, executed environmentalists in Greenland, the battle in K-Paul’s yesterday afternoon, or Twist’s murder in a movie theater the night before.

Everything had been about her infiltrating the rig using a false identity, thereby suggesting she was up to no good.

“I had nothing to do with what happened.”

“Why don’t you tell us what happened exactly?” Detective Hurst asked, making Katie realize he didn’t even know as much as she did.

That had been several hours ago, and this time she’d been brought up to a different interrogation room with brighter walls, a newer table, and floor complete with heavy-duty industrial carpeting.

Hurst pushed his way through the door, looking ruffled and annoyed. “You really should talk to me,” he said, standing across from her with palms planted on the table. “Might be my last chance to help you out here.”

“Why’s that, Detective?”

“Because you’ve drawn some pretty big attention from the kind of people you don’t want noticing you.”