The Eye of God (35 page)

Back out on the street, Gray hailed a cab. They quickly crossed a city that was an odd mix of ornate Mongol palaces, blockish Soviet-era buildings, and serene Buddhist monasteries. Over it all hung a shadowy pall, courtesy of the city’s pollution and smog.

He leaned next to Seichan, slipping his hand into hers, and whispered like a lover in her ear, “Feel like climbing through some sewers?”

She smiled. “You always know how to make a girl feel special.”

4:28
P
.
M
.

With the sun low on the horizon, Seichan stood next to Gray as he pried open a manhole cover, exposing the steam tunnels that crisscrossed beneath the world’s coldest capital city. A waft of hot air blew up from the city’s bowels.

Along with it came faint singing, like a distant children’s choir.

It was disconcertingly sweet coming from this steamy netherworld.

“People make their homes down there,” Gray said.

Seichan had spent her fair share of time in such hiding places, fleeing the cold, finding company with other children of the street. With the city’s high level of unemployment, coupled with its struggle to make the transition from communism to democracy, people fell through the cracks, including lots of homeless children.

Gray headed down first. Their actions were hidden by the shadow of a neighboring apartment complex. It lay only a couple of blocks from their goal. Back in D.C., Kat had pulled blueprints for the warehouse from city records. They discovered this set of steam tunnels led directly under the building and offered access to it via heating ducts.

Seichan descended the ladder, quickly abandoning the bright, cold day for the warm, dark tunnels. With each rung, it got hotter, quickly becoming nearly unbearable. And then there was the overbearing stink of refuse and waste, some of it human.

Gray clicked on a flashlight and dropped to the tunnel floor below.

She joined him, hunched down, coming close to burning herself on a pipe overhead. She switched on her own flashlight and swept its beam down the tunnels that branched in four directions. Down one, she spotted a scurry of motion, a flash of a small, scared face.

Then nothing.

Even the singing had stopped.

She expected the tunnels were regularly raided, the children rounded up and likely sent to detention centers that were little better than the North Korean prison.

No wonder they ran.

“This way,” Gray said and headed in the direction of the warehouse.

The path was not straight and required checking their map twice. Finally, Gray waved her low.

“That next ladder should lead up to the main warehouse floor. We’ll only have the element of surprise for a short time, and we don’t know how many guards we’ll find up there.”

“Got it.”

In other words
,
move fast.

She adjusted the night-vision goggles atop her head. Gray wore a matching set, looking like he had the disarticulated eyes of an insect.

She waved him forward, having to go on hands and knees from here. As Gray departed, Seichan felt something grab her ankle.

She twisted around, a pistol in her hand, elongated with a silencer.

She found herself facing a small girl of nine or ten, with almond eyes and wide cheekbones, as if looking in a mirror of her own past. The child cowered from the weapon.

Seichan pulled the pistol away, freeing her leg from the girl’s fingers.

“What do you want?” she whispered in Vietnamese, knowing it was close to Mongolian.

The girl looked after Gray, or at least in the direction he was headed. She shook her head and tugged the edge of her pant leg as if to pull her back.

It was a warning of danger.

The children living here must have surmised she and Gray were not with the police. Then, tracking the two of them, they must have realized their goal. Clearly the children down here must have had encounters with the warehouse guards—and not pleasant ones. The effort to warn them was likely less about concern for her and Gray than it was for themselves. Whatever transpired, it was likely to have dire repercussions for the street kids down here.

And they were probably right.

Retribution might be exacted upon those living down here after they left. But there was little Seichan could do about that. She couldn’t change the harsh and unfair ways of the world. She’d had that beaten into her enough times to know.

I’m sorry
,
little one. Get as far from here as possible.

She tried to communicate that.

“
Ði,
” she said in Vietnamese.
Go.

With a final scared flash of her eyes, the child vanished into the darkness, a shadow of her former self.

Gray hissed for her from the foot of the ladder, oblivious to what had transpired. She hurried over to him. He silently climbed the rungs and secured tiny charges to the locked grate up top.

Dropping back down, they both ducked to the side as he hit the detonator.

A fast bang echoed. It was not much louder than a firecracker, but it would surely draw any guards in the warehouse.

Gray rushed up with Seichan behind him. He hit the smoking grate with the palm of his hand, knocking it open. With his other hand, he expertly tossed in two smoke grenades, rolling them in opposite directions. As the bombs blew with a flash of fire and a blast of smoke, Gray and Seichan rolled out onto the warehouse floor.

She already had her night-vision goggles in place. Lying on her back on the concrete floor, she targeted every light she could see through the smoke.

Firing rapidly she took them all out, sinking the warehouse into deeper darkness.

Gray was already moving, running for the office. It was the most likely place the relics would be secured. If they were wrong, they would force one of the guards to talk.

Muffled blasts of suppressed fire marked Gray’s progress across the chasm of the warehouse. She stayed on her back, hidden by the smoke, holding their exit. She toggled her scope to infrared, picking out the heat signatures of guards rushing from the far side of the warehouse. She aimed her pistol.

Pop
,
pop
,
pop . . .

Bodies crumpled.

Others scattered, seeking cover, firing back blindly.

Seichan knew the smoke cover would only last a few more minutes, then she would be left exposed out here.

Don’t take too long
,
Gray
.

4:48
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.

Sweeping through the smoke, Gray fired upon anything that flared through his scopes. He took out two men on the floor and another on the open stairs leading to an office that overlooked the warehouse. He climbed two steps at a time, staying low.

A bullet pinged off the stair rail.

He swung toward the source, identified the heat signature, and fired.

The shooter fell.

Clambering to the top landing, he shot out the door lock, not even bothering to pause to check if it was unlocked. This high up, he was clear of the smoke.

Proving the danger, a burst of rounds peppered the front of the office.

Not slowing, he shouldered through the door and rolled low inside. He kept away from the windows and kicked the door closed while still on his back. At the same time, he swept his pistol across the small space. A door at the back led out to more administration spaces and a conference room.

Finding the room empty, he stayed crouched and checked that back door.

Locked.

Good.

He didn’t want any surprises from that direction.

The desk was not in direct view of the windows so he stood up, noticing the boxes and cases stacked there. The largest was tied up in a blanket. It was the right size from Vigor’s description. A peek through a fold revealed tarnished silver.

Gray pawed through the rest but failed to find the other relics. He tried the desk drawers. In the bottom one, he discovered a wolf mask staring back up at him.

So Borjigin had been here, likely savoring his new treasures.

While bent down, Gray spotted a small army duffel tucked into the knee well of the desk. He unzipped it and found the skull and the leather book inside. Relieved, he tossed the duffel over a shoulder and lifted the box under one arm. It was heavy and awkward, but it left one hand free to hold his pistol.

A quick glance out of the window showed the smoke beginning to clear.

His search had taken too long.

Using a toe, he nudged open the door. He spotted two men running up the steps toward him, both carrying submachine guns with flashlight undermounts. Beyond them, a firefight was under way in the fading smoke as Seichan kept the rest of the warehouse at bay.

Thinking quickly, Gray ripped off his night-vision gear, rushed back to the desk, and opened the bottom drawer. He grabbed the wolf mask and tugged it over his face. He snatched his pistol back off the desktop—just as the door was kicked open.

As he turned, two men burst inside, submachine guns at their shoulders. Their flashlights blinded him, but the sight of the wolf mask startled them. Fear of its mysterious owner made them pause for a fraction of a heartbeat.

Gray used it to place rounds in both of their heads.

As their bodies fell, he leaped past them, stopping only long enough to trade his pistol for one of their weapons. With the mask still over his face, he burst out the door and slid down the stair’s railing to the main floor. Rounds ricocheted around him as he landed hard in the thinning pool of smoke.

He crouched low as he fled, coming upon a guard running at him.

The man’s eyes widened as the apparition of a wolf’s head appeared out of the pall before him. Gray cut him in half, firing at point-blank range.

Only afterward did Gray realize
why
he’d run into the man.

The firefight from a moment ago had gone silent.

The guard had clearly been trying to escape.

He found Seichan where he had left her. She was up on a knee, disheveled but unharmed. She swung toward him, and it took her a visible extra beat not to shoot him.

He tugged off the mask and threw it aside.

She scowled at him. “You truly have to stop wearing disguises, Gray. It’s very unhealthy for you.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you’re unarmed next Halloween.”

4:52
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Seichan assisted Gray in getting the blanket-wrapped box and satchel down into the steam tunnels. With the smoke down to a heavy haze, she kept watch, but it appeared any surviving guards had fled.

Searching around, she noted the warehouse was stacked with boxes of dry goods, electronics, car parts, even baby formula. It seemed Batukhan had his fingers into many different pies, including hoarding foodstuffs in a city where many starved.

She followed Gray below, back into the stink and the heat.

He managed the box, crawling ahead, while she shouldered the duffel.

Reaching a side tunnel, she spotted a familiar face shining back at her. Seichan paused, reached to her own head, and tossed over the night-vision goggles. They would be invaluable to a little girl trying to survive in this dark netherworld. But it wasn’t only this one child.

Beyond the little one’s shoulder stirred more shadows, likely representing hundreds of other kids.

Seichan pointed back to the ladder, to the wealth lying unguarded above.

“
Ð! Hãy! Nó là an toàn!
” she called to them all.
Go! Take! It is safe!

With nothing more she could do, Seichan headed after Gray.

She might not be able to change the world, but she could at least make this small part of it momentarily a little better.

21

November 19, 5:00
P
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. ULAT

Khentii Mountains, Mongolia

Jada and the others climbed out of the darkness and into the light.

With the sun less than an hour from going down, the group had set a hard pace up the forested flank of the mountain. The upper peak blazed with the day’s last light, reflecting off snow and ice. The woods below—a mix of birch and pine—lay in deep shadows as night filled the lowlands.

Wolves howled out of that rising darkness, accompanied by yipping echoes, welcoming the coming sunset. It seemed the Wolf Fang had not earned its name from its shape alone, but also from what haunted its slopes.

Beyond the forest stretched the highland meadow they had crossed earlier. It seemed impossibly far below.

Hard to believe we gained this much elevation.

Jada thought she spotted movement down there, along the edge of a patch of dark woods, but as she strained to see what it was, it vanished.

Shadows playing tricks . . .

Duncan still had his ear cocked to the chorus of the neighboring woods. “The wolves. Will they attack people?”

“Not unless provoked,” Sanjar said. “And seldom when faced by numbers such as ours. But it is the start of winter, and they are beginning to grow hungry.”

Duncan plainly did not like that answer. “Then let’s keep going before we lose any more light.”

“Why?” Sanjar pointed ahead. “We’re already here.”

Jada swung in her saddle to return her attention forward, to this last island of daylight in the sea of night. They had reached a wide plateau, a giant’s step in the side of the mountain. The snow line began another thirty or forty yards upslope, but she saw no lake.

“Where is it?” Duncan asked.

“Around that tumble of boulders to the west,” Sanjar explained and trotted his horse in that direction, dragging them all with him.

They circled past the old rockslide. It was a narrow squeeze between the pile of boulders and the edge of a steep cliff. Jada eyed the precarious stacking. It looked like an avalanche that had frozen in place, but more likely it had been there for centuries.