They really did bear a strong resemblance to Olmec. Maybe Mayan? The problem was the building they were on. It was a perfect classic pyramid, a four-sided, smooth-walled triangular structure that would put the pyramid at Giza to shame. And here it was on the bottom of the ocean near Cuba. That didn’t fit with any history of the world she’d ever learned.
Minimizing the shots of the ruins, Finn opened the page with all the text changes marked. Then she pulled up an Olmec glossary, an Egyptian one, and a few others, hoping that one of them would act as a key.
* * *
She completely lost track of time. The hunger in her belly was the only indication that it had past at all.
Finn pushed her chair back from her desk and stood up, stretching to the audible crack of her joints realigning. Every bit of pain was worth it because she’d finally found a match. While not perfect, it was as close as she was likely to find.
For the hundredth time she looked at the two images side by side. She’d been right first time: they were Olmec. The images on the ruins were a little sharper, more formal in their construction, but that made sense considering they had been carved into what was obviously a holy building. Carving was the business of sharp lines and clean edges. Any image could be chiseled out, but it would wind up more even, more precise in appearance, than something crafted with the smooth sweeps and flourishes of handwriting.
So what she was looking at here were Egyptian pyramids with Olmec carvings at the tip of the Bermuda Triangle. There was something absolutely impossible about the juxtaposition, she knew. But it was brilliant.
These carvings were close to home, but the pyramids themselves were in a part of the world they had no business being in, making this one of the strangest discoveries Finn had ever heard of. Which meant, inevitably, she’d be questioned, doubted, and probably accused of falsifying her data to get attention. The joys of academia. None of that changed the truth of what she was looking at, though.
The images challenged the established socioanthropological norms. Everything academia thought it understood about migratory populations and the reach of Egyptian culture was undermined by a couple of deep-sea images. They were a game-changer.
And outside the storm worsened.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
THE DOOR OPENED INTO A DARK, NARROW TUNNEL that stretched out before them.
“After you,” Ryan said.
Jake retrieved the pin before allowing the door to swing closed behind them. There were no obvious light switches, but a quick sweep of the Maglite revealed several small white ovals along one side of the wall, set a little above head height. At a guess, battery-powered emergency lights. He tapped one. It glowed slowly to life, confirming his supposition. Nice. But he wasn’t about to light any more of them just yet. Better to go forward in the dark. He tapped the light again and it dimmed. He hooded the flashlight beam with a hand, keeping it aimed at the immediate ground in front of him. Ryan did likewise.
The tunnel was straight. There were no obvious bends or junctions turning off it. They walked slowly forward, placing each footfall carefully, not wanting their steps to echo ahead and announce their arrival.
It took them a surprisingly long time to come to another capstan-locked door. This one was in much better condition than the outer door.
Jake twisted the capstan wheel; it moved freely, well oiled. Behind it, he found a staircase, leading up. He nodded to Ryan, who killed his flashlight and followed Jake as he took the steps slowly.
The risers beneath their feet were well worn in the middle, meaning at one time or another they’d been heavily trafficked. The brickwork was painted sky blue above their heads. As they reached the top they faced another door. No capstan this time. Jake paused and heard footsteps on the other side. He stood right behind the door and waited, his whole body tense, ready to slam it into whoever was unlucky enough to open it.
The door didn’t open. He waited, still tense. Behind him, Ryan fidgeted. Then he heard something, a slide, and realized his partner was carrying. It was difficult to relax, even after the footsteps had faded to nothing.
“What the fuck are you doing what that?” Jake rasped.
“Protecting your pretty little ass. Someone’s got to.”
Jake shook his head. “Seriously not cool, my friend.”
“Tell that to the first fucker who tries to ventilate your carcass.”
“Do you even know how to use that thing?”
“What do you think?”
He looked Ryan in the eye. He didn’t want to admit what he thought. He knew a killer’s eyes—Ryan knew how to use the gun. He didn’t want to know where he’d learned. He stopped trying to argue with him, and decided to open the door.
It led into a decorative hallway, straight out of a better, vanished time. It was all hardwood floors with thick brass carpet runners, and exquisite end tables showcasing priceless art. It looked every inch the exclusive old gentlemen’s club, though after his encounter at Penn Station it was hard to think of the people in here as anything approaching gentlemen in anything but the most vulgar form of the word.
Jake slipped out into the hall. Ryan followed him, closing the stairwell door carefully behind them. They began to make their way down the hall, but with no real clue as to where they were going it didn’t matter whether they went left or right. Jake was looking for stairs, working on the principle that anything of value or importance wasn’t going to be in the basement or on the ground floor. They needed to be up near the top floor of the brownstone.
They were halfway down the hall, a few feet from a door, when it opened. A guard stepped through. The man—dressed in the uniform black and gray of almost every single flunky he’d ever encountered—was armed to the teeth. He carried a submachine gun cradled in the crook of his left arm, a holstered pistol at his belt, and a wicked knife strapped to his thigh.
Jake couldn’t give him the chance to raise the alarm—or to get a shot off. Without time to think, he threw himself forward, putting himself between Ryan and the guard so he couldn’t shoot even if his trigger finger itched. Forgetting combat training in favor of pure street-fighting instinct, Jake then launched himself at the guard, who turned right into the trajectory of his clubbing fist. The punch answered the riddle of what happened when an impossible force hit an immovable object. The object’s head snapped back, lights out, and hit the deck cold.
“Fuck . . . one punch, man.” Ryan said, voice full of admiration. “Nice.”
“Take his legs,” Jake said as he grabbed the guard under his arms. They carried him back toward the staircase down to the subway level.
Jake thought about dumping him in there, assuming no one would venture that way, but it was a risk. He needed to minimize the chance of someone simply stumbling onto the unconscious man or of him being able to raise the alarm when he came around. Short of slitting the guy’s throat, that was going to be easier said than done.
They passed the door, looking for an alternative. The third door to the left opened onto a small storeroom. There was industrial-strength shelving filled with a survivalist horde of food, electronics, emergency gear, and other supplies meant surely to see out the apocalypse. Everything imaginable, and lots of things he’d never have considered. Jake dragged the guard into the storeroom. He found industrial tape on the shelf, and used it to bind the guy’s hands and feet, then slapped a piece across his mouth. There was no way his screams were going to bring the house down. Done, he shut the door behind him.
“That should buy us a little time,” he said. But just how little was little?
He started trying doors, one at a time, carefully working his way down the hall. A few were locked, nothing he could do about that. A few had voices coming from inside so he didn’t bother even trying them. The place was a labyrinth.
They found the stairs and went up. They opened out into a grand foyer, with wooden balustrades and paneled walls that reeked of old money. There were leather couches and smoking paraphernalia beside an open hearth, tall glasses on the table beside the butts of smoked Cuban cigars. But there were no people.
Jake heard a noise off to the left, which he assumed must be the kitchens.
The stairs continued up. On the next landing they found the library. Well appointed, floor to ceiling with leather-bound books, no doubt priceless, like the works of art decorating the walls. In the hallway Jake saw what he was sure was Raphael’s
Portrait of a Young Man
. On the wall in the library was an unmistakable van Gogh,
The Painter on the Road to Tarascon
, and in the smoking room Bellini’s
Madonna and Child
. They were priceless works of art, and each had one thing in common—they were considered lost in World War II to the Nazis, presumed destroyed. Yet here they were, in this brownstone in Manhattan.
Everything has a price.
He couldn’t even begin to imagine what else was hidden in this place.
They kept on looking, not sure what it was they were hoping to find, mindful always of how long they’d been inside and of every creak and groan the old building taunted them with, expecting a shout at any second to let them know their time was up.
It was as though they’d stepped back in time to some colonial plantation house. Jake felt deeply uncomfortable, sure they were the first black men to set foot inside the brownstone who weren’t servants.
Then on the fifth floor he tried a door that opened onto a small, tidy little study off a reading room. There was a slick high-tech computer dominating the green leather inlay of the desk’s surface.
“Now this is more like it,” Ryan said, setting his gun down beside the terminal as Jake shut the door behind him. The computer was in standby mode, not full shutdown. He tried waking the machine up, but the words
Enter Access Code
popped up in the middle of the screen.
“How about a little space while I work my magic?” Ryan said, grinning. He was enjoying himself now, very much in his element.
Jake moved over to the window and looked down into the street. Life seemed so ordinary out there. Snow settled. Snow swirled. People hurried by, heads down, hurrying to get out of the storm. It was hard to imagine there was a fight for control of the city going on right now on every corner, in every waking network and computer system, every banking system, air traffic control, anything and everything he could think of. It all just looked so normal, like any other winter night. Even the streetlights were coming back on.
Behind him, Ryan rubbed at his face with one hand, staring at the display as if he could simply bludgeon it into submission with the sheer intensity of his will. He’d come prepared; this was his world. They didn’t need to have a folder labeled
Secret Global Domination Plan.
They could wrap themselves in a million levels of code and cyphers and protections. But this was Ryan’s domain. No matter how smart they were, he was smarter. He slipped something into one of the ports on the machine, cracked his knuckles as if about to start a piano symphony, and started typing.
“Fuck,” Ryan said after a few seconds. “No, no, no, no, no.”
“What is it?”
“Fuckers,” Ryan grunted, his hands moving fast across the keyboard. Then he slammed his fist on the table beside him and kicked the chair away from the terminal, making a lot more noise than Jake was happy with. “The fucking code’s optical.”
“What? You mean like eyeball scanners?”
Ryan grunted again, looking at Jake like he had just fallen out of the moron tree and hit every branch on the way down.
Optical.
He’d said it himself, a scanner. Not eyeballs though.
Jake dug his phone back out of his pocket and scrolled through the recent messages to the last one, from Sophie, with the elaborate QR code embedded in it. She’d said it was a stone for fighting Goliath. “Like this?” he said, handing it over to Ryan.
Ryan took it from him and angled the phone up at the computer’s webcam.
Come on, Sophie, don’t let me down,
Jake willed, staring at the screen while the pair of them waited for something to happen.
There was a faint but audible click as the computer seemed to accept Sophie’s QR code and the regular desktop opened up for them.
“And we’re in,” Ryan said. There was nothing fancy about the desktop, no secret Hidden logo on the screen like he’d have expected if Tom Cruise was playing his part on the big screen. Nothing like that at all.
But Jake wasn’t watching the screen anymore. There was a photograph on the bookcase, three men fishing, shaking hands over a big catch. He recognized two of the three. One was the incumbent whiter-than-white president, who’d just been sworn into office; the other was Harry Kane.
He didn’t know what to do with that. It had to be a coincidence, surely. That’s what two things were. It needed three things to be a pattern. But . . .
“You need to see this,” Ryan said, pointing at something on the screen.
The first time Jake read it, it made no sense. The second time scared the shit out of him.
He read it three times. It had to be some sort of mistake. Wishful thinking by some seriously fucked-up mad men . . . some sort of Nietzschean superman crap.
The documents were all there, the gruesome details of their plan, an itinerary that started with blowing up Fort Hamilton, then progressing through terror after terror to the moment Jake first spotted two of their foot soldiers inside Times Square. In addition to the stock exchange, the trunk lines, Port Authority, and Penn Station, they’d targeted air traffic control and the MTA itself, meaning his worst fears had been right—they were out to conquer New York. But there was so much more to it than that, or seemed to be. It wasn’t some bullet-point itinerary, it was photos, schematics, and other pieces of the sick puzzle.
“This is some heavy shit,” Ryan said.
“Can you search for something for me?”
“Sure. Hit me.”
“Harry Kane.”
It took a couple of seconds to return a string of results revealing that Harry’s name was all over this system.