Ice Claw (43 page)

Tishenko saw Max’s fascination. “That is a damp firework display compared to the apocalyptic event that will take place in only a few hours. My name is Fedir Tishenko. Where is Zabala’s stone?” He tossed the useless pendant at Max.

So, Max realized, Sharkface had landed himself in it.

“Where is my friend?” Max said, daring to bluff confidently.

“He is dead.”

No way. Max wasn’t going to accept that Sayid was dead until he saw his body. This monster was trying to scare him.
Max didn’t show his emotions. “That’s a pity. He had the stone.”

“Oh, brave try, young Mr. Gordon. You have dogged my ambitions for some time now. We searched the boy, he had nothing. You, however, are the kind of threat I could make no allowances for in my plans. You have it. You must. Why else are you here, other than to make a futile attempt at stopping me.”

“I’m here for my friend.”

“But you did not know he was here until a few hours ago. Who told you?”

“No one,” Max lied. He looked at Sharkface. “I saw your thug here kill Peaches.”

“Why am I not surprised to hear that? Ruthless ambition can do strange things to a person. And then?”

“I followed him here.”

“Liar! No one followed me! I swear it!” Sharkface yelled, desperate for his life.

Max smiled. “You’re rubbish, mate. I could have followed you with my eyes closed in the middle of the night. You led me right here. I found Bobby Morrell’s van, and my friend left a clue there for me.”

Max was looking around, taking in as much as he could. There were big screens dotted around the room. Satellite pictures from space. Gathering storms across the Atlantic. Cold-weather, low-pressure fronts projected across Europe and a swirling, snakelike coil of clouds twisting towards the Alps. That was the expected monster of a storm. Hours away.

Max tightened his stomach muscles and faced the disfigured man. “Your people have been so careless it’s downright
sloppy. If you think you’re going to rule the world or whatever insane scheme you’ve got planned, you should hire better staff.”

There was a stunned silence. And then Fedir Tishenko did something he could not remember ever doing before—he laughed.

“All right, you have courage. And you did not cringe when you saw my face. I like that. I am going to show you something.” He curled his finger, beckoning Max to him.

Max stepped farther into the room, which angled away. A CGI map of Europe filled the wall. It was easy for Max to see exactly where he was. Red veins crisscrossed the map.

“You know what this is? What those lines are?” Tishenko said.

Max didn’t, but it wasn’t difficult to guess. “Telluric currents.”

“Very good,” Tishenko acknowledged. “Watch.”

Tishenko pressed a button, and an electronic clock appeared in one corner and the hours and minutes spun fast-forward. The projected path of the storm centered over Lake Geneva, and at the Citadel mountain a huge graphic flash appeared—a rod of golden light shafted into the three-dimensional mountain, and a shock wave of energy rippled downwards and out along the veins. Surrounding mountains crumpled, the lake burst like a water-filled balloon and every red line on the map glowed. It was as if the sun had exploded belowground. A black swathe of destruction collapsed a path across Europe.

It was, Max realized, the complete and utter devastation of a huge area. That was a shock he could not disguise.

“Now I see you understand. Zabala knew of the geophysical danger here. Switzerland is fragile, and his original prediction almost came true twenty-odd years ago. But they reinforced the tunnels at the nuclear research center—then they thought they were safe. And Zabala was ridiculed. I offered them billions of dollars to include my regeneration proposal, but the governments involved did not dare accept my challenge.”

“So all of this is about revenge and death on a big scale?” Max said.

“No. This is about revenge and life on a gargantuan scale. Do you understand metamorphosis? The changing of man into beast?”

Max could only nod, his own dark world of shapeshifting still a mystery to him.

Tishenko pointed a remote control at the far wall. It was merely a screen. Shuttered steel slid to one side. He gestured with pride and stepped onto a narrow gangway. Max had never before seen anything like the huge shimmering light that lay a hundred meters or more below them. It was a spiked crystal. It must have measured twenty meters across and thirty high. Its jagged arms were like miniature missiles pointing outwards at every angle.

“Geothermal water in the mountain created this. I discovered it when I first started tunneling. Within the crystal is life.”

Max looked down. Copper-colored conduits, each ten meters thick, locked the crystal into steel girders twice its size, securing it to the rock face. Behind that, hundreds of meters beyond the vast cathedral-sized tunnel, was what appeared to
be a gigantic fan. It was so enormous that it filled the height of the room. Max thought it looked like a huge generator whose blades would feed power into, and light up, the crystal.

“Many years ago the Japanese perfected a technique of storing DNA in a crystal, using liquid nitrogen. They froze every cell into deep hibernation. And then the experiment was stopped. They were afraid of what life form they might create. But I am not.”

Tishenko stepped closer. Max curled his toes in his trainers, imagining he was gripping the floor to stop himself from backing away.

“Regeneration. I found people like me, scorned and rejected by our so-called civilized society. I found the emotionally wounded, and those who struggled to keep the demons in their minds at bay, and those whose bodies were malformed, whose twisted limbs caused fear in others but whose minds were scalpel sharp. I offered these people everything. I bought their intelligence, I secured their loyalty and I offered them a new life in the future. Just as I have decided to offer you a new life,” Tishenko said quietly, in awe of his own power.

Before Max could say anything, two of the armed men grabbed him and sat him in a chair. A white-coated man, whom Max hadn’t noticed before, stepped forward. He carried a small kidney-shaped dish and a hypodermic. Max struggled, heaved and pushed, but one man held his head in a viselike grip and two others held his arms and legs down in the chair. The needle slipped into the vein in the crook of Max’s arm and the white-coated man drew a vial of blood. A small Band-Aid was carefully placed over the puncture wound.

Tishenko nodded and the men stepped away. Max kicked
the chair across the room, wanting to back into a corner to defend himself.

“Death is only a bridge between two worlds. Look what I offer you,” Tishenko said.

He slid back a frosted-glass door. Inside was a cabinet with a couple dozen vials of amber liquid.

“Your blood will be mixed with that of one of the animals whose DNA we have stored—and then placed deep inside that crystal. The scientists at CERN believe their particle accelerator can find that moment, that fraction of a second after this world was created. At dawn tomorrow my lightning charge will blast through my own particle accelerator, and its design is more powerful. I will re-create creation. Not a microsecond afterwards, but the exact moment. And life will, years from now, grow from that crystal. Charged with power, it will evolve man and beast. Intelligence and strength that will determine a new world species. Symbiogenesis: it is the creation of a new form of life through the merging of different species.” Tishenko smiled. “I have built the new Noah’s Ark.”

“I’ve seen supermarket carts with a wheel missing that are more stable than you,” Max said, unable to hide his disbelief. “You’re certifiable.”

Tishenko’s insanity was all the more frightening because of the power he wielded and the resources at his command. It would make no difference if a warning had reached CERN. Once Tishenko triggered that power, it would rupture and tear apart the nuclear research facility and everything that lay beyond it.

Tishenko looked with pity at the boy who had backed into a corner, crouching, as if ready to fight for his life.

“You will die, Max, before I unleash the storm. You will be dead by then. I promise you.”

Sayid had to be found. And Angelo Farentino had given him another reason to survive—to discover the truth about his mother’s death.

Max knew he had no chance unless there was more time.
Never give up
.

“You’ve got the wrong time for your big bang theory,” he said.

“And why do you say that?” Tishenko asked carefully.

“Because I have seen Zabala’s stone and the alignment of the planets—that’s what you’re looking for, isn’t it? Well, that’s all supposed to happen at twenty-six minutes to twelve tomorrow morning.”

“And you think I am going to believe you?”

“You have to. I have the stone.”

Max knew he had to hand over that last vital piece of Zabala’s prediction, because without the extra few hours’ grace he had no time to make a plan.

Tishenko shuddered. An involuntary ripple of expectation. At last; the exact moment for his ambitions to be realized.

He held out his crinkled hand.

From where Corentin and Thierry sat, the distant mountains looked more formidable than they had ever seen them. The lightning flashes were fairly constant now, and the thunder reverberated across the valleys. Sophie had begged them at the hospital to help Max. If they didn’t there’d be destruction
on a massive scale. And Max was trying to save his friend. Corentin and Thierry would do that for each other, wouldn’t they?

Corentin had phoned an old friend, a former Legionnaire who now worked in the French DGSE, the Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, their secret service. Corentin’s urgency ripped through the usual formalities. Governments were frightened now. Pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fit more neatly. Intelligence communities and the French police were liaising, scientists were forced to look at a possible disaster scenario, and while no one could actually agree and put a plan together, Corentin and Thierry had made their own.

A flurry of sleet danced around the car. Corentin opened the trunk and hauled out two huge holdalls. Each man pulled out the equipment he needed: ropes, climbing gear, two Heckler & Koch machine pistols with laser sights, extra clips of ammunition, grenades, flares, two-way radios, bulletproof vests and night-vision goggles. Thierry led the way. They couldn’t destroy the obstacles in their path—that would warn Tishenko’s people—so, like Max, they had to find another way in. Corentin’s contact had told him about the
vucari
. Private armies were one thing, but blokes who thought they were so special they called themselves wolf men needed a lesson in reality. It would take time, but Corentin and Thierry would climb round, find a way inside the mountain and engage the enemy. That had a nice ring to it.

That felt good.

Max had cut the stone out of his trainer’s heel, and within minutes it was confirmed that this was indeed the vital, final part of Zabala’s secret.

“And those numbers etched into the crystal?” Tishenko had demanded.

Max could only shake his head. “I’ve no idea. Part of some code. But I don’t know what.”

The truth of Max’s ignorance convinced Tishenko. Numbers meant nothing now—the time was what mattered.

He gestured to his men and Sharkface was pulled to his feet. “I shall give one of you the opportunity to die quickly—the other will be torn apart by wolves.”

A gaping hole led out onto a snowfield. Churning clouds muscled each other aside as they rolled across crevasses and peaks. The cold air bit into Max’s face, but it wasn’t the chill wind that made him shudder.

Max and Sharkface stood on a steel grid. A pack of about twenty wolves yelped and snarled five meters below their feet. These animals had been deliberately starved.

“You two seem destined to fight each other,” Tishenko said.

He gestured to his men, who grabbed Max and Sharkface. They attached a stainless-steel clamp to Max’s left wrist and another to Sharkface’s right. Two meters of chain joined them. Max had been chained to Aladfar, but this boy was a far more dangerous beast.

“You have ten minutes to run before my wolves and I give chase. Two kilometers away, on the edge of this escarpment,
you will find two ice axes. If you live that long, I expect one of you to kill the other, and then I, or my wolves, will kill the survivor.” Tishenko checked his watch. “I suggest you start running.”

Max leapt forward, Sharkface half a second behind him.

They ran through hardened snow covered by a few centimeters of powder. The two boys were dependent on each other at least until they found those ice axes—after that, Max didn’t even want to think about.

Despite the darkness there was enough light to see the sweeping valley and the mountain’s jagged claws of bare rock reaching down into the ghostly white. Max took a handful of the swaying chain, tightening it, making it easier to run. After a moment Sharkface did the same. Max glanced at him. Spittle flecked away from the boy’s jagged mouth. Was Sharkface fit and strong enough to keep this pace going for a couple of kilometers?