The Last Oracle (24 page)

Blood spurted, and the man fell straight-backed to the pavement.

Kowalski snatched up the man’s pistol and extended the cane across the tangle of limbs and men. Gray grabbed the handle, and Kowalski pulled him free.

“Death by butter,” the large man said. “Not bad, Pierce. Puts new meaning to watching your cholesterol.”

All around, the square had erupted in chaos. People fled in all directions. Uniformed police tried to wade against the human tide. Gray and Kowalski, now huddled low, allowed themselves to be dragged by the current out of the square and into the neighboring streets.

After a few harried minutes, the massive bulk of the red sandstone fort rose ahead of them, perched on the banks of the Yamuna River. They crossed toward the ancient walled structure—Akbar’s Fort—a major tourist attraction of the city, second only to the Taj Mahal.

Taxis, vans, and limousines lined the avenue before it.

“Pierce!” a shout called to him.

Shay Rosauro waved from beside one of the limousines, a long white whale. He marched over to her. Luca stood at the open door. Masterson and Elizabeth were already inside.

“Not exactly inconspicuous,” Gray said, eyeing the vehicle.

“Should hold all of us,” Rosauro explained—then offered a sly smile. “Besides, who says we can’t pimp our ride a little?”

“Lady knows what she’s talking about,” Kowalski said and strode toward the front. “Maybe they’ll let me drive it.”

“No!” echoed from both Gray and Rosauro.

With a wounded frown, Kowalski returned and ducked into the back of the limo. Rosauro followed.

Before joining them, Gray searched the sidewalks, the streets. No one seemed to be paying attention. Hopefully they’d shaken their tail completely. He craned around and stared across the curve of the river.

Off in the distance, the white marble of the mausoleum glowed with sunlight, peaceful and eternal, slumbering beside the bright water.

Gray turned his back on the Taj Mahal.

Only the dead slept so peacefully.

As he entered the back of the limousine, Masterson let out a gasp of outrage. “What did you do to my cane?”

Gray fell into his seat. The eighteenth-century ivory handle was bloody. The fine detail of the carved crane had been ground smooth from its ride across the braided wire.

“The cane is the least of your worries, Professor,” Gray said.

Masterson glowered at him as the limo pulled from the curb.

Gray pointed to the man’s bandaged ear. “Someone’s trying to kill you. The question, Dr. Masterson, is
why
.”

10

September 6, 7:45 A.M.
Washington, D.C.

“Loose ends,” Trent McBride explained. “There are too many of them.”

Yuri saw the man glance in his direction, but he didn’t flinch. Let them kill him. It did not matter. Yuri sat in an office chair. They’d allowed him to dress again after removing the electrodes. His fiery torture had continued for another twenty minutes. Yuri had not held back. He’d divulged much, confessing more details about the genetics of the children, the secret he and Savina had kept from the Americans.

He even admitted why the Russians had not objected to Dr. Archibald Polk’s recruitment. Yuri admitted that Polk had been getting too close to the heart of the genetic secret. Savina had already planned to orchestrate an accident while the man was at the Warren, to silence him.

But in this game of scientific brinkmanship, neither he nor Savina imagined that Polk’s own colleague and friend would arrange his escape, all to lure one of their children out into the open.

And Savina had taken the bait. She cared little that Polk had escaped with the skull, which McBride had given him. It was the genetic secret he held that had panicked Savina into sending Yuri and Sasha into the hunt for the man. She had fallen cleanly into the American’s trap.

“Loose ends?” Mapplethorpe asked, drawing back his attention. He shook his head, unconcerned. “I see only three. The girl, the skull, and Polk’s trail in India. The last is already being handled. And I’ve heard
rumblings through intelligence channels that our missing skull might mysteriously turn up.”

“How did you manage that?” McBride asked.

“Get waters boiling just right, and you’ll be surprised what will come to the surface.”

“And the girl?”

Yuri paid more attention. Mapplethorpe’s gaze flicked to him. Yuri knew the only reason he was still alive was because of Sasha. Mapplethorpe needed him, knew about her medical condition, about a problem seen in all the children. The stress of the mental manipulation was not without physical consequences to the subjects. In fact, few lived far into their twenties, especially those with the most savant talent. It was a problem that required harvesting eggs and sperm to keep the strongest genetic line viable.

Mapplethorpe sighed. “We should have the girl before the sun sets…if not sooner.”

And you’ll still be too late
, Yuri thought.

So simple these Americans, so quick to assume that what was tortured testimony was the whole story. While Yuri had not lied, he had committed one sin:
a sin of omission
. In fact, McBride hadn’t even known the question to ask, so secure was he in his superiority and his sadistic trust in the power of pain.

Yuri kept his face stoic. They sought to break him with their tortures, but he was an old man, one used to keeping secrets. All they’d accomplished was to harden his core for what was to come. In the past months, Yuri had started to have reservations about Savina’s plan.

It was only natural.

Millions would die in horrible ways.

All for a new world to be born.

A new Renaissance.

Yuri stared at Mapplethorpe’s self-satisfied smirk and at McBride’s bright-eyed confidence.

All hesitation died inside him.

Savina was right.

It was time for the world to burn.

2:55 P.M.
Southern Ural Mountains

General-Major Savina Martov knew something was wrong. She felt it in her bones, a nonspecific anxiety. She could no longer remain in her office. She needed reassurances.

With a radio held to the side of her face, she led two soldiers through the dark and abandoned streets that cut through the old Soviet-era apartments that filled the back half of the Chelyabinsk 88 cavern. The featureless concrete blocks that rose to either side were the original housing for prisoners who worked the mines and refinement plants. The men had traded life sentences in the gulags for five years’ work here. Not that any of them ever saw that fifth year. Most died from radiation before the end of their first year.

A foolish gamble, but then again, hope could turn any rational man desperate. This was the legacy she had inherited. It served as a reminder.

Others thought her cruel, but sometimes necessity could wear no other face. The children were well fed, their needs attended. Pain was minimized as much as humanly possible.

Cruelty?

She stared around at the hollow-eyed apartments, cold, dark, haunted.

All she saw was necessity.

The radio fritzed at her ear as Lieutenant Borsakov came back online. So far she had heard only negative reports from the second in command. He was still searching the surrounding mountains and foothills for the children. He’d been led astray by several false trails, discovering a discarded hospital shirt.

“We found two dead dogs,” Borsakov said. “By the river. They’d been torn to shreds. Bear attack. But we’ve picked up a strong trail.”

“And what about the cats?” she asked, speaking into a radio.

Silence stretched for a moment.

“Lieutenant,” she said more firmly.

“We were holding off sending them until we had a clear trail. Didn’t want to risk the dogs with the tigers ranging the hills.”

He kept his voice practical, but Savina recognized the strained edge behind his words. The lieutenant was not so much concerned with the dogs as he was the children.

Why did she always have to be the hard one?

She spoke crisply. “You have a strong trail now, do you not, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, General-Major.”

“Then do not disappoint me again.”

“No, General-Major.”

She clicked off the line. She may have been harsher than she intended, but she’d already heard disturbing news in the past hour.

A maintenance worker from the neighboring town of Ozyorsk had discovered one of the Warren’s decommissioned trucks, one once used to transport waste from a uranium enrichment plant near the shore of Lake Karachay. Inside, the worker had found a fake badge with Dr. Archibald Polk’s face.

It answered the mystery of the professor’s escape.

He’d had help.

And it didn’t take much contemplation to figure out
who
had assisted in his escape. It had to be Dr. Trent McBride. What game were the Americans playing? With Yuri’s continuing silence, she could only imagine that he and the girl had been captured. In fact, the escape might have been staged to accomplish just that end.

If so, Savina had to respect McBride for such an effort.

Like her, he understood
necessity
.

In retrospect, she should have never engaged in a partnership with the United States. But she’d had little choice at the time. In the turmoil following the breakup of the Soviet Union, her project had lost all funding. It was only through such a union that her work was allowed to continue.

The United States supplied the interim cash, seeking new ways to expand their ability to gather intelligence. Her project offered such a promise. But her project also offered one thing more. She supplied the American government with
plausible deniability,
similar to the secret CIA-financed torture camps in Europe. In this new world, the lines of acceptable conduct—whether military or scientific—had become blurred.

Not on our soil
was the new American credo.

And she’d been happy at the time to exploit that.

Still, the loss of Yuri and the child was not insurmountable. It only required accelerating her timetable. Her operation—titled Saturn—was supposed to follow Nicolas’s actions in Chernobyl by a week. Now the two would commence on the same day.

Tomorrow.

The two operations—Uranus and Saturn—were named after two strategic offenses during World War II, when Soviet forces defeated the Germans in the Battle of Stalingrad, the bloodiest battle in human history. Close to two million were killed in that battle, including vast numbers of civilian casualties. Still, the Germans’ defeat was considered the turning point of the war.

A glorious victory for the Motherland.

And as in the past, Operation Uranus and Saturn would once again free Russia and change the course of world history.

And likewise, not without casualties.

Necessity was a cruel master.

Savina reached the far wall of the cavern. A tunnel opened, framed by thick lead blast doors, miniature versions of the same doors that closed the main tunnel into Chelyabinsk 88.

Just inside the mouth of the tunnel rested a train and bumper stops. The electrified tracks carried a single train back and forth between the Warren and the heart of Operation Saturn, on the far side of Lake Karachay. The old tunnel went under the toxic lake, allowing for fast transport between the two sites without risk of exposure to the lake’s hot radiological soup of strontium 90 and cesium 137.

The train was already waiting for her.

Savina climbed into one of the lead-lined cabs. There were only two enclosed cars, one on either end of the train. The remaining four sections were open ore cars for hauling supplies, mining gear, and rocks.

As the train sidled out with a
clack
of wheels and sizzle of electricity, the blast doors sealed behind her. The tunnel went dark. She stared up as the train began the five-minute journey. As it accelerated, Savina pictured the weight of water overhead, insulated by a quarter mile of rock.

The region above was the heart of the Soviet Union’s uranium and plutonium production. Mostly now defunct, the facility had once had seven active plutonium production reactors and three plutonium separation plants. It was all sloppily run. Since 1948, the production facilities had leaked
five
times more radiation than Chernobyl and
all
of the world’s atmospheric nuclear tests
combined
.

And half that radiation was still stored in Lake Karachay.

The radiation level on the lake’s shore measured six hundred roentgens per hour. Sufficient to deliver a lethal dose in one hour.

Savina remembered where the maintenance worker from Ozyorsk had found Dr. Archibald Polk’s abandoned truck.

On the shore of that lake.

She shook her head. There had been no need to hunt down Dr. Polk. He’d been dead already.

Lights appeared ahead.

It glowed with the hope for a brighter future.

The heart of Operation Saturn.

3:15 P.M.

“They’re planning on doing
what
?” Monk said, a bit too loudly as he walked alongside the riverbank.

He and the kids had been walking alongside the churning river for the past hour. It was not the same waterway as where they’d encountered the bear. Monk had forded that turbulent stream by using a series of boulders and followed it down to this larger river, buried in a dense fir forest. Monk
had studied the topographic map several times. It seemed they were following along the watershed that drained the eastern slopes of the Ural Mountains. On the western side, the Urals shed their rainwater and snowmelt into the Caspian Sea; on this side, it all flowed into a region of massive rivers and hundreds of lakes, all of which eventually emptied into the Arctic Ocean.

What the Russians were planning…

Shock had rung in his voice.

Konstantin winced at his sharpness.

“I’m sorry,” Monk said more quietly, knowing voices traveled far in the mountains. He had been the one to warn the children to speak only in whispers. He obeyed his own rule now, though his voice was still strained. “Even with the hole in my memory, I know what they’re planning is madness.”