Finally, he turned to face Ethan again.
“What would I have to do?”
“Bring your gun,” Ethan replied. “And consider yourself drafted by a higher power.”
The source of the sound seemed to rise from the very heart of the ruined complex.
Without a word, Daniel began working his way in that direction, ducking around debris and climbing over where possible. His damaged foot, which had never been fully restored after the severe beating he took shortly before meeting Grant Borrows the first time, barely let him get on and he leaned on Lisa for extra support. She didn’t protest for once, even though he knew she must be thinking this was foolhardy.
He didn’t care. He was on a mission. He felt alive—truly alive—for the first time in a long time, and it felt good.
They had only gone about fifty feet before, to their far right, they discovered a pre-made pathway that appeared to lead directly into the heart of the destroyed building. It was as if the wreckage and remains and all of the boulders from overhead that had fallen in this area had made room for a narrow path that led far inward.
There was just enough room along the path for one person to maneuver through, so they had to walk single file. Daniel took the lead. Slowly, they worked their way deeper inside, until the rubble reached higher than their heads and the path became more like a canyon, very dark and towering well above them. There was a dim light source somewhere far ahead.
The sound still seemed to wait ahead of them, but it was definitely closer now. They heard it every few seconds, echoing throughout the tiny corridor and growing louder the farther they went.
“With our luck,” Lisa whispered from behind, “it’ll be Grant’s grandfather back from the dead.”
Daniel’s mind focused only on what lay ahead. The ground beneath his feet didn’t escape his notice either, his eyes periodically glancing down in the dimness to search in case they should stumble across fragments of the Dominion Stone.
They made it to within fifty feet of the light source when Lisa grabbed his arm from behind.
“Wait,” she whispered, barely audible. A slight urgency and panic was in what he could hear of her voice. “What if it’s, you know . . . somebody
bad
?”
Without looking back, he let the backpack fall off of his shoulder into one hand and pulled a black pistol from inside. He held it up just high enough over his shoulder for her to see.
She gasped. “Where did you get that?” she whispered, a little louder than he was comfortable with.
He stopped and turned to face her. “Ethan had five of them. And a whole bunch of ammo.”
Her eyes grew in shock and disapproval, but Daniel didn’t linger to watch her reaction turn to scolding, as he knew it would. He resumed his approach toward the end of the tunnel, now creeping slowly, his bad foot throbbing with the effort.
Twenty feet away, he made out another sound that accompanied the banging, a guttural grunt. It was the kind of sound a gorilla might make upon exerting itself especially hard.
Daniel cast a quizzical gaze back at Lisa before continuing. He released the safety from his pistol and extended the weapon straight ahead, edging slowly forward until he reached the end of the tunnel.
There, he mashed himself back against the tunnel wall, and held out his right arm, pressing Lisa against the wall too. Daniel held a finger to his lips and then peeked his head out from the tunnel into the larger open space beyond, where the sounds sporadically continued. But his view from this vantage point didn’t encompass the whole room, and the banging and huffing were coming from a spot around the corner that he couldn’t see without being seen.
This central chamber was the same large inner room where Grant and his grandfather had faced off against each other, not so long ago. Only it was mostly turned to garbage now.
Daniel held out a hand toward Lisa to signal her to stay put. He closed his eyes briefly and let out a calming breath. He tried to imagine what Ethan or Payton would look like, and swung himself fully out of the tunnel and into the room, gun extended with both hands in front of him.
He blinked.
An old man with a bald spot and gray hair was hefting wreckage in the center of the room and slinging it onto a large pile. He stood fifteen feet from Daniel, facing sideways relative to Daniel’s perspective. He didn’t look up when Daniel approached.
The man appeared more or less harmless; he was easily in his mid-sixties, with a slightly hunched back, leathery skin, and . . .
And he was missing a hand. His
left
hand to be exact, which instead bore a functioning, but quite obviously prosthetic replacement.
Something about this felt familiar, but Daniel couldn’t quite sort it.
Slowly, Daniel lowered the gun until it was at his side. He put it back into his jacket pocket and waved Lisa to come out of her hiding place.
An expression of confusion and hesitation on her face, she stepped out and followed Daniel’s gaze until her eyes landed on the old man. In barely a second, she registered the same shock and recognition that Daniel had.
“That’s not Grant’s grandfather,” she whispered. Turning to look around them, she added, “And he’s been here for a while.”
Daniel saw that a camping tent had been erected off to one side in this wide open space, and a large backpack containing food and other supplies lay open on the ground next to it.
He looked at Lisa, eyebrows raised high. She shrugged, then took a step forward.
“Uh, hi there,” she called out conversationally, as if talking to a child.
The old man looked up at last. He appeared a bit surprised that they had snuck up on him and appeared so close. He seemed to size them up for a moment, and then the moment passed. He grunted roughly and motioned for them to come closer before returning to his task.
“What’s your name?” Lisa tried.
The old man merely grunted again without looking up.
Lisa said, “I don’t know if he can speak.”
Daniel nodded, his mind still searching for an echo of something he couldn’t quite grasp.
“Oh,” Lisa gasped. “Oh, wait! Didn’t Grant say something during the L.A. riots about meeting a man with only one hand who couldn’t talk?”
That was it! Of course! “Yeah, yeah . . .” Daniel muttered. “He somehow told Grant about the Three Unholy Acts—”
“—which were counting down to something,” Lisa finished. “Guess now we know the big countdown was T-minus Oblivion.”
Daniel nodded at the memory.
“So, uh,” Lisa continued, but turning now to the older man, “you know Grant Borrows, don’t you? Are you the man who met him at a nursing home during the L.A. riots?”
The old man grunted again and gave a barely perceptible nod.
“Was that a yes?” Lisa whispered.
“Grant said the man he met that day had damage to the speech center of his brain,” Daniel whispered back. “If this is the same guy, then that’s probably the best
yes
he’s capable of. But why is he here?”
Lisa shrugged again and walked closer to the man. Daniel followed.
“We’re friends of Grant’s,” Daniel said, deciding that this was not the time to mention that Grant was dead. “I’m Daniel and this is Lisa.”
As they cautiously approached, the man waved them forward again, more urgently this time.
They rounded the pile of rubble and saw stacked neatly at the man’s feet a collection of more than two dozen brown stone fragments.
“Those are fragments of the Dominion Stone!” Lisa cried, unable to stop herself. Her outburst echoed throughout the room and into the cave beyond.
The old man stopped his work at once and looked straight up at the barely attached boulders and stones hundreds of feet above. He watched closely until the echoing sound of Lisa’s voice faded, then let out a shuddering breath. He threw her a nasty look of warning and returned to his work.
“Might want to pull back on the loud noises,” Daniel whispered at Lisa. “I just wish he could tell us who he is.”
The old man ignored this while continuing to sift through the rubble at their feet.
Lisa gasped again.
Daniel jumped at the sound. “Stop doing that!”
She pointed at something over his shoulder.
Daniel turned. Fifty feet behind him, sprawled upon the ground, was the body of a man with perfectly groomed salt-and-pepper hair, wearing a crisp suit and an expensive gold watch.
Daniel was certain he knew who this was, but he couldn’t resist checking it up close. He had to be positive. Together, the two of them walked closer to the dead body.
The dead man lay face up, and the two of them were nonplussed to see that the man’s wrinkled eyes were frozen open, staring directly ahead in shock. He had one arm on his heart, clutching it hard. He looked for all the world as though he’d suffered a heart attack and collapsed in shock. And stayed in that position at the moment of his death.
His body had already entered decomposition. It wasn’t so much that he was unrecognizable, but it was more than enough to give off the distinctly sickening odor of rotting flesh.
“That’s who I think it is, right?” Lisa asked.
Daniel inspected the body closely. “It’s Grant’s grandfather. But it looks like he’s passed something on to the next Keeper.”
He pointed and Lisa followed his direction. The silver Ring from his right middle finger was gone.
“So this is how Devlin retrieved it,” Lisa observed. “Interesting that he came all this way to get the Ring but left the Dominion Stone fragments behind, don’t you think?”
“Lends credibility to Trevor’s suspicions about the Secretum fearing the Stone,” Daniel replied.
They left Maximilian Borrows where he lay and walked back toward the handless man.
“Huh,” Lisa remarked, shaking her head in wonder as the old man came into view again.
“What?” Daniel whispered.
“What are the odds,” she whispered back, “that we venture down here to this destroyed Secretum base looking for the Dominion Stone, only to find some weird old man with one arm already digging it out, like he’s waiting for us to arrive?”
“Add it to the List of Crazy,” Daniel replied.
Daniel stepped up alongside the old man, who grunted at him again. This time the man precariously lifted a stack of Dominion Stone fragments off of the ground with his one good hand and tried to hand them to Daniel.
“Oh!” Daniel exclaimed. “Um, okay . . .” He fumbled, opening the pack on his back and allowing the old man to drop the fragments inside. Another couple of handfuls and Daniel had every piece the man had recovered.
“Have you found all of it?” Daniel tentatively asked, scratching his hand again.
The old man grunted and gave a halfhearted shrug, which
Daniel took to mean,
I don’t know, but what I found is probably
enough.
Without a word, the old man turned from them and began exiting the way they’d come in, through the narrow tunnel in the rubble.
“So . . .” Lisa stammered, “are we supposed to follow him?”
Daniel almost laughed at the absurdity of this. “I have absolutely no idea.”
“Well, he seems to know where he’s going, and that works for me,” she replied, weary and ready to get out of this wretched place.
It took some time, but they followed the old man through the rubble and back toward the opening in the cave wall. Down the dark, sloped tunnel, and back out onto the platform where their Conveyor Pod waited.
Instead of boarding the Pod, the old man made a sharp left and moved to a three-by-three metal grate in the platform. Kneeling, he unlatched something and the square grate gave way to reveal a ladder leading to the bottom of the Conveyor tunnel below. Without preamble, he began to descend, something he managed with surprising ease considering he had the prosthesis.
Daniel and Lisa exchanged a significant look, and then followed him. At the bottom of the tunnel, the old man led them to a tiny side passageway, at the end of which was a very old door made of solid oak. Inscribed into the door was the six-pointed symbol of the Secretum, surrounded by extraordinarily ornate scrollwork that seemed to serve no purpose but look impressive. The number 102 was inscribed in the center of the symbol.
The old man opened the door to reveal a tiny, cylindrical room. On the other side of the room was a ladder that led up into the darkness, well out of their field of vision. The man grabbed the ladder with his single hand and began to climb as handily as he had descended the last ladder.
Daniel started to follow him, but Lisa tugged at his shirtsleeve from behind. “Guy has an awfully intimate knowledge of this place, don’t you think?”
He nodded in reply; truthfully, he’d been thinking along the same lines. Who was this old man, and how did he know so much about this place? Was he a member of the Secretum? Had he worked at this underground facility at some point in the past?
They climbed for what seemed like hours, and no one said a single word. Sweating hard at the effort, Daniel thought of what a bizarre trio they were. The old man with his one hand, Daniel with his ruined foot, and Lisa pulling up the rear, consumed with worry and fear.
This trip had confirmed his earlier suspicions: She really had changed after their experiences in London. She was more wary now, and much more apprehensive about engaging in anything dangerous. He thought back to her gung-ho exit from the plane in Jerusalem, only a week or so ago. While he had displayed much more cowardice about wanting to enter the destroyed city and help with the cleanup, she had basically grabbed a shovel and wouldn’t let anyone stand in her way.
He supposed he had changed significantly from recent experiences too. His confession of guilt to Lisa had lightened the weight that had been consuming him internally. He was far from absolved for his offenses, but everything that had been holding him back seemed so irrelevant, so pointless now. He had a renewed vitality that he felt no desire to explain away with logic or science.
At the top, they found a small sliding door that opened into an elevator shaft. To the right was an elevator door opening to the bottom floor of whatever building they were in, and Daniel and the old man set to work forcing it open.