It was a human being, a man, but with a horribly disfigured face. His skin tone looked Egyptian, but his nose and his mouth looked like they had been grafted together into one bizarre opening, a repulsive cavernous hole in the center of the man’s face. The hole had stretched the rest of the facial skin, turning the man’s visage into an uneven, vile leathery mask.
Grey’s stomach turned, and he looked away. He remembered what Stefan had said about the horror of true genetic defects. He couldn’t imagine entering the world with the curse of that terrible disfigurement.
Grey thought of Nomti, and of the man with the cleft lip, and of the man with the birthmark covering his face. Had Al-Miri gained their loyalty by offering hope to these unfortunate scions of a dispassionate Mother Nature? Had he offered them a potential cure with his elixir?
Grey tried to hate the man that had just tried to kill him, but he couldn’t. He could only pity him for the unbearable life he must have had, for the monster he had become.
He picked up the mace, and then dropped it. It was far too heavy for him to use as a weapon. He wished it had a sharp edge so he could sever his bonds. He rethought that. If it had a sharp edge he would be dead, one of his vital organs pierced by a backward thrust during the choke.
He went to the door. Locked, and made of solid metal. He had a thought and he walked to the sarcophagus, which had swung shut after the man had burst out of it. Grey’s fingers found the crease, and he pulled it open.
An opening was cut into the wall behind the sarcophagus. The opening to a white-walled passageway.
V
eronica saw a blur of vivid colors: the saffron glare of the sun, the flash of green robes, the swirl of golden sands stirred by the vehicles. The men hustled them into the jeeps, and they sped through a cloud of dusty air towards the structure in the distance.
At first Veronica thought the driver had tipped them off, but judging by the rough treatment afforded him, she discarded that notion. It didn’t matter; they had known the risks. They knew the figure standing in the palms, whatever it was, had seen them.
Viktor looked grim but calm. He had been here before. Stefan’s face showed signs of eagerness. Not fear, not worry. Eagerness.
Veronica looked inward. She was petrified.
They drew closer, and Veronica covered her mouth with her hand. A white building shone against the brown clump of sandstone with the feverish purity of a Cycladic chapel. At first she thought the building was standing in front of the mound of sandstone, but as they drew closer, she realized the rectangular building had been built into the face of the hill. It made Veronica think of the rock-cut architecture of Petra, redesigned with modern sleekness.
She saw a plane a hundred yards to the left, where the slope of sandstone ended and a paved runway vanished into the desert like a ribbon of shaved pencil lead. An enormous satellite dish and cell tower, both blindingly white, stood atop the hill.
She saw no sign of an outside source of electricity—how could there be? They must have some serious generators working that place, she thought, if it functioned as a lab.
The jeeps rolled to a stop within feet of the structure. The men herded them out, gun barrels glinting in the sun, arms waving. One of them strode forward and swiped a card through a nearly invisible white slot set into the face of the structure. A portion of the wall, a man-sized doorway, slid open. Veronica and the others stepped into the welcome coolness of an air-conditioned building.
The entrance was a large, empty foyer with a polished cement floor. Three white-walled hallways led into the building, and the guards ushered them down the central one. Recessed fluorescent lighting provided illumination, and the place had a dry chemical odor, as if the ventilation system contained a mixture of desert air and antifreeze.
The inside looked similar to most labs: gleaming, industrial, sterile. The impersonal aura of science. They were led past numerous closed doorways, a few open ones displaying laboratory equipment, and side hallways that branched off in both directions.
I could be back in New Jersey
, she thought.
I could be anywhere there’s a lab
.
They reached the end of a long passageway, and stood before an enormous metal door. Another hallway ran perpendicular to the doorway. Veronica glanced down the passage to the left and saw a series of glass doors. The hallway to the right looked barren.
The same guard slid his card through another slot next to the door. After a loud click the door swung inward.
Veronica corrected her previous thought. Labs in New Jersey did not have rock tunnels lit by torches behind doors at the ends of hallways. Nor did they have prehistoric cave art chiseled into sandstone tunnel walls. The guards ushered them forward, down the sloping passage. The art covering the walls was crude: outlines of humans and animals, mostly avian and bovine figures, all facing in the direction the guards were leading Veronica and the others, as if in silent procession towards some ancient theater.
The artists had utilized the natural fissures, curves, cracks and arches in the sandstone to form the figures, as Veronica had seen with other examples of primitive art. A long crack served as the back of a bovid, a curved fissure the sweep of a thigh.
It didn’t take an archaeologist to recognize the faded authenticity of the drawings, and a hushed awe overcame her. These clumsy attempts at human expression had existed for thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years. The artists had wanted what everyone wants, what has remained unchanged since prehistoric times: recognition by the cosmos, justification for existence. They were shouting to the heavens, immortalizing themselves on these prehistoric walls.
The cave art switched the ambitious corner of Veronica’s brain back on. She tried to store every detail in her memory. What had the guards done with her camera bag? She reminded herself that she was, that all of them were, in mortal danger, but her mind kept running to another place, to the potential of this story, to whatever it was that waited at the end of this tunnel. Was it ambition, or was it a survival mechanism, a forced naiveté? She looked at her captors in their silly green robes, and almost giggled out loud.
The tunnel narrowed, and they proceeded two abreast. Viktor, dark and solemn, fell in behind her. Stefan moved to her side. Stefan’s head took in the surroundings as if set on a swivel, eyes wide, mouth slack.
The tunnel dead-ended at a wall of solid limestone. The guards kept moving them forward, and when they drew to within a few feet of the wall the ceiling opened. The wall in front of Veronica ended ten feet in the air, and a group of jagged ridges, like limestone stalagmites, topped the wall. She couldn’t see what lay above this: subterranean darkness reigned above the top of the wall, as mysterious and opaque as an ocean bottom.
She noticed an open space on the right side of the wall, and she realized it wasn’t a dead end. From a distance they had flushed together and looked as one.
The guards forced them through the opening at the end of the wall. Veronica slipped through and had to turn back to her left almost immediately. What she had thought was the end of the tunnel was a curved lip of sandstone, five feet thick and ten feet high, almost as wide as the tunnel, and with those curious spiked edges at the top.
When they reached the other side of the odd formation, the tunnel began again. She glanced back as they continued down the tunnel. The limestone formation looked, she thought, like a natural rock gate. She noticed Viktor looking at it with raised eyebrows.
The murmur of voices began as soon as they reached the other side. She could see a group of people in robes, clustered at the end of the tunnel. The guards urged them on. Her step faltered as she moved forward.
Who are these people? Where are they taking us?
The tunnel spilled onto a ledge. A huge cavern sprawled before her, both above and below the ledge. The immensity of the open space surprised her, but it was at the bottom of the depression, far below the ledge, that she saw the unbelievable thing.
She forgot the danger of their situation, forgot about Nomti and disfigured assassins and eerie figures swathed in white bandages. She forgot everything, and could only stare in awesome curiosity at what lay below.
Stefan gripped her arm from behind. “Do you see it,” he said in a cracked voice, speaking not to Veronica, she knew, but to himself.
“
Do you see it
?”
T
he passageway behind the sarcophagus didn’t extend far. It ended at a doorway, which opened for Grey. On the other side was a corridor, identical to the hallway outside the room where he had first been held. The door leading to the sarcophagus had been painted white, such that it blended into the corridor.
Grey eased the door back, but didn’t let the lock click into place. The corridor stretched a hundred feet in both directions, white and bleak. He had no idea where to go. He just knew he needed to find Jax and then an exit.
He chose left. He passed a few empty glass-walled rooms, and then the corridor dead-ended. He backtracked and tried the other way, passed more rooms, and this time the passage ended at another hallway. He turned left again, and fifty feet later he found Jax.
Jax was just as Grey had been, trussed up in the center of an empty room. Jax saw him through the glass. His mouth opened, words formed, but the glass must have been soundproof, because Grey heard nothing.
Grey simulated kicking the glass with his foot, then signaled for Jax to back away. Jax rolled to the rear of the room, and Grey put his foot to the glass with as much force as he could muster. It didn’t budge, and the pain in his leg from his earlier beating caused him to grit his teeth. He grimaced and kicked a few more times, then stopped and panted. Jax just stared at him, eyes wide.
Grey held a finger up, then returned to the hidden doorway and the room with the sarcophagus. He avoided looking at the bandage-wrapped giant lying on the ground, and picked up the mace with both hands. The thing weighed a ton.
He carried it back to Jax’s cell and managed to bash the huge metal head against the glass wall, shattering it like a cheap plate. The mace left jagged shards sticking out of the inch thick glass wall, and Grey and Jax each put their rope bonds on a piece of jagged glass and started sawing.
“Thanks a million, cuz. Don’t suppose you happen to know which way the exit is, or how long we have before a bunch of bad guys show up?”
“I wish I did.”
They shook off their bonds and left the mace behind, since Jax could barely lift it either. They explored the nest of monochrome hallways as fast as they could. Grey felt like he was stuck in a human rabbit warren. They must have passed a hundred glass-walled white rooms and a thousand fluorescent lights before they encountered a particularly long corridor, and the scenery changed.
Laboratories and cabinet-filled work spaces replaced the empty glass enclosures. Some of the laboratories appeared to be in use, some did not. None of the doors was locked, which made Grey uneasy. Unlocked rooms meant there was no real fear of an intruder.
Where had they been taken?
The laboratory section proved much smaller in scope. Grey counted fifteen smaller rooms, and three gigantic labs filled with gleaming equipment and racks of test tubes. Something else made him uneasy: where was everyone?
The labs ended at a broad staircase. They climbed and found the living quarters, speeding through the rooms without a word. If they didn’t find an exit soon they were going to run into someone. For all Grey knew a silent alarm might have sounded already.
The rooms were Spartan affairs, small white pods filled with rumpled cots and medical books. Lab coats and green robes hung from pegs on the doors. They searched a few of the rooms for weapons, then gave up after finding nothing.
On the far side of the second floor they encountered a locked wooden door. Grey kicked it in. Behind the door sprawled a master bedroom strewn with Egyptian art and tapestries, with a beautifully patterned rug covering the floor. Grey noticed a green robe on a hanger, shinier than the other robes they had seen.
“Must be Al-Miri’s bedroom,” Grey said.
“Then where is the bastard? Is there a company picnic today?”
Grey gave the room a brief search, and pocketed a rectangular key card he found in a bedside table. Jax pointed at a narrow spiral staircase on the far side of the room.
They descended and found themselves in a circular chamber. A pile of plush carpets surrounded a basin depressed into the finished concrete in the middle of the room. A clothing rack stood against the wall to Grey’s left, filled with three more of the glossy robes.
Grey joined Jax in staring at the basin. The water in the basin looked normal, and Jax toed it with his foot. The water plopped and rippled, and they shrugged and moved on to another door, this one set into the wall opposite the staircase.
The next room: more carpets, braziers of unlit incense in each of the corners, hieroglyphs scrawled on the wall, three jade-colored chalices resting on a low table in the center of the room. Grey knew this was a room of ritual, a mistress to the unknown, a sanctum sanctorum. A room removed from the secular world of his past, a room that belonged in the spidery attics and hidden basements of his new profession. A room in Viktor’s house.
They pushed through a set of double doors on the far side of the room. A carpeted hallway led to the left and the right. They chose the right, and the hallway dead-ended at a locked metal door. Jax kicked it, then grimaced. It wasn’t budging.
Grey noticed a narrow slot to the left of the door, and he swiped the card he’d taken from Al-Miri’s bedroom. The door slid into the wall.
Medical equipment lined the walls of the small room on the other side of the door. A wheeled gurney sat in the center, connected by a tube to a metal stand. Grey heard a steady beeping sound coming one of the machines, and then noticed that the sheet on the gurney covered the outline of a form.