Black Scorpion (29 page)

Alexander finally screeched to a halt in a parking space out of sight from the private terminal around the corner. The three of them lurched out together and hurried the rest of the way inside.

“She needs to clean up,” Alexander told Michael, casting a glance toward Scarlett. “She'll attract too much attention looking like this. And we need to disguise ourselves. Fast.”

Michael, his mind still in a fog, looked at Scarlett.

“I heard him,” she said, spotting the nearest woman's bathroom. “See if you can find me something to wear.”

*   *   *

The best they could do was a souvenir sweatshirt that read
I SURVIVED ROMANIA
and a New York Yankees baseball cap, of all things. Michael knocked on the lavatory door and handed them to Scarlett as soon as she opened it, her skin smelling of commercial soap and hair sodden and matted from being rinsed in the sink.

“Thanks,” she told him, managing a smile. “For everything.”

Fortunately, they'd prepared for this eventuality by having Paddy fabricate a British passport with Scarlett's picture for her to use. As he and Alexander used an adjacent men's room to better disguise themselves to resemble the faces in their passports, Michael's mind drifted back to the contents of the file on his father. He continued to struggle with what it all meant, as his turn finally came in the line to pass through Romanian Customs and Immigration.

“I asked you,” the clerk repeated in English, his voice growing impatient, “what was your purpose here?”

“I was on vacation,” Michael responded in broken English with a thick Spanish accent. His fake beard was itching and he didn't dare scratch it for fear it might come off.

“Did you buy anything while in the country?… Sir?”

“What?”

“Did you buy anything while in the country?” the clerk asked, clearly perturbed now.

“I'm sorry. No, I didn't buy anything. I was here to visit Transylvania, the mountains and the countryside. Very beautiful.”

Michael realized he'd said too much, the clerk eyeing him suspiciously and letting the passport stamp hang in the air between them. Their eyes met, the clerk's intentions unsure.

Michael's heart was racing. What if a warning had been already been issued to be on the lookout for two men meeting his and Alexander's general descriptions? What if the clerk had already triggered an alarm and was stalling so security could arrive?

Madness!

His heart skipped a beat when he heard a
thump
, realizing in the next breathless moment the sound had come from the clerk smacking the proper immigration stamp down on Michael's fake passport.

“Come back and visit us again. Next, please.”

*   *   *

“I need you to copilot for takeoff,” Alexander told him, once they were on board the Citation. “I need you, Michael, and you need to focus. I just scheduled the flight plan, but we haven't been cleared for departure.”

Michael saw why once he was seated in the cockpit. The storm was pounding the Citation so hard he could barely make out the airport buildings around him. The flashing red beacon atop the air traffic control tower cast an occasional pinkish haze through a narrow break in the relentless rain that the jet's windshield wipers were having even less luck clearing than the Alfa Romeo's.

“Whatever you say. Just get us out of here, Alexander,” he called, feeling for his seat belt.

“I'll lay in the course back for London.”

“No,” Michael told him, “not London. Not yet.”

“Where then?”

“Sicily,” he told Alexander. “Catania, the nearest airport to Caltagirone.”

*   *   *

Alexander had switched on the engines while Michael completed the more mundane preflight protocols. Then Alexander hailed the tower over the radio.

“This is Citation Larry-Delta-Charlie. Again requesting immediate clearance for takeoff.”

“Citation Larry-Delta-Charlie,”
an air traffic controller blurted in heavily accented English,
“you do not have clearance for takeoff. The airport is closed to all departures. Repeat, the airport is closed to all departures due to extreme weather conditions.”

“What do you want me to do, Michael?” Alexander said, as heavy winds shook the Citation in its perch on the tarmac.

“Get us the fuck out of here.”

“Just what I was thinking.”

And with that Alexander eased the throttle forward and turned the Citation's nose for the nearest runway, the small jet bucking as he pushed it straight into the wind.

“Citation Larry-Delta-Charlie,”
came the air traffic controller's harried voice again,
“I say again, you do not have clearance.”

“Tower, we have an emergency on board and are contravening your instructions. Please clear approach traffic from our course.”

“Negative, Citation Larry-Delta-Charlie. You are not cleared for takeoff.”

“The responsibility is ours. Wind speed and the potential for shear are increasing. We have a brief window to takeoff now. Please clear heading…”

Alexander completed plugging in their coordinates from memory and eased the Citation into motion without waiting for confirmation. The jet picked up speed in blinding fashion, so quick Michael could feel the G-forces seeming to contract his chest. Crosswinds from the storm caught the Citation in their grasp and shook it about once they were airborne, Alexander struggling to level the jet off. The controls vibrated madly in his grasp, then slowed to a tremble, as the small jet clung to a steady climb through the choppy air and driving rain. Climbing felt like swimming against a riptide to the point where Michael began to wonder if they might stall out or even roll. Suddenly cockpit lights started to flash, warning buzzers sounding as their air speed reached dangerously low levels. The small jet pitched downward suddenly; then, just as suddenly, it managed to regain altitude with the engines still screaming in protest. Finally, it found a gap in the storm, both Michael and Alexander able to breathe again.

“You okay back there?” Michael called to Scarlett in the cabin.

“Oh, just fine,” she said to him, her voice broken by fear. “At least you're consistent.”

“How's that?”

“You always know how to keep things interesting.”

 

SIXTY-FIVE

B
UN
Ă
Z
IUA,
R
OMANIA

Dracu smelled the aftermath of the battle in the first light of dawn blocks from turning onto the street housing the decimated
Securitate
building. He had his convoy park well down from the chaos of rescue and police vehicles surrounding it and sent a pair of his most trusted captains on ahead.

They returned through the haze of smoke and confusion, toting a man with char, ash, and grime all over his face and uniform with an adhesive wrapping fastened over his clearly swollen right hand. His men shoved the colonel into the back of the Range Rover to join Dracu and Armura.

“How many men were there?” Dracu asked, resuming when the man seated next to him remained silent. “I'm giving you a chance to talk and stay alive.”

The colonel seemed unable to take his eyes off first Armura, and then Dracu's veil. “I only saw two,” he said finally. “Two men.”

“Did you recognize them?”

“They wore masks and goggles,” the colonel said, passing a hand before his own face. “Spoke English.”

“Anything else?”

“One of them took a file.”

“What file?”

*   *   *

Dracu handed him his phone after Colonel Gastman explained its contents.

“Call your men at the airport. Find out if any foreigners have made it past security in the past hour.”

Gastman did just that as the man in the veil looked on, hoping to learn enough information to stay alive.

“They boarded a Citation,” he reported finally. “Its originating point was listed as London. It took off from Napoca despite the storm against the tower's instructions not long ago.”

“Bound back for London?”

“Originally. But the flight plan was switched in flight to Catania in Sicily.”

“Sicily,” Dracu repeated.

“My man at the airport isolated their pictures from Customs. They've been sent to the number you gave me.”

Dracu checked his pocket-size tablet and found the pictures waiting. But none of the three faces were recognizable or could be identified, as if all three had been schooled to avoid looking directly at the cameras. Two men and one woman, obviously disguised, was all he could tell.

And that was enough.

“One more thing,” he said to Colonel Gastman, still staring at one of the two men pictured. “Tell your man at the airport to have my jet readied for takeoff.”

 

SIXTY-SIX

L
AS
V
EGAS,
N
EVADA

“It wasn't an explosion that caused the rupture,” Gregory John Markham told Naomi, as they viewed the footage picturing the aftermath of the destruction of Edward Devereaux's Daring Sea suite yet again.

The Seven Sins had hired Markham away from Perini Building Company after he proved to be the only engineer neither intimidated nor overwhelmed by the challenges involved in constructing the Daring Sea and its underwater suites. Far from it. Instead, he embraced the project as the challenge of a lifetime and didn't quit even after dozens of failures with models and various composites.

“At least, not the kind of explosion you'd expect,” Markham continued.

Markham was all of thirty-four now, but had been barely twenty-six when he was hired during the construction of the Daring Sea environment. It was the crowning achievement of his young career, enhancing his reputation to the point where he had gained more work than he could handle. Not about to forget who'd entrusted him with such an opportunity, Markham dropped everything as soon as Naomi called.

Markham's knowledge and foresight had led him to conclude that glass, no matter how sturdy and stable, was prone to rupture. In fact, the stronger it was, the higher the likelihood of a catastrophic event in what he called an ascending arithmetic scale. The solution was to create “softer,” more malleable sections of glass that displaced energy and absorbed a force strong enough to rupture the glass-like polymer before the rapid chain of events, better known as cracking, could even begin.

Not surprisingly, then, Markham looked at investigating the circumstances of Deveraux/Faustin's death as a matter of personal pride. He was convinced from the start what happened was in no way an accident or a random occurrence under any circumstances. Proving that meant not only exonerating himself from some level of responsibility, but also providing further validation of his theories on building large-scale underwater habitats that could potentially house thousands, even tens of thousands.

“What do you mean by not the kind of explosion I'd expect?” Naomi asked him in the sprawling Seven Sins command center that offered every conceivable view of the entire resort, including the Daring Sea.

“Well,” Markham started to explain, having to remind himself not to sound too academic, “explosives are normally incendiary, relying on a combination of a blast wave, heat displacement, and shrapnel spread to do their damage. But the fragments of the glass I examined that were recovered from the victim's suite showed no signs whatsoever of any of those, no scoring or searing at all.” With that, Markham slid an anomalously smooth fragment of the glass from Devereaux's suite atop a lab tray in front of her. “See, no scorching, no external rupture. The cracking you see exemplified here that ultimately compromised the glass polymer's integrity happened from the inside out, not the outside in.”

“How is that possible?” Naomi asked.

“Only one way,” Markham told her and proceeded to emit a high-pitched wail that forced Naomi, and any technician on duty around them, to squeeze her hands over her ears.

“There was a point to that, I assume,” she said when the sound finally waned.

“You've seen demonstrations of opera singers capable of shattering glass with their voice.”

“I never believed they were real.”

“Oh, they most certainly are. Not common, mind you, but very much real. Sound travels in waves and when those waves reach a certain pitch or modulation, they have the capacity to damage any object. Glass is far more molecularly fragile than, say, wood or steel, and that makes it much more subject to the effects of these waves that are better described as ultrasonic frequencies.”

“Wait a minute, are you saying
sound
is what killed Edward Devereaux?”

“A sonic bomb would be a more apt description,” confirmed Gregory John Markham. “But, yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.”

 

SIXTY-SEVEN

L
AS
V
EGAS,
N
EVADA

“I've reviewed footage of the great whites in the moments during the blackout,” Markham continued. “What you need to understand is that sharks use sound to locate food; in fact, it's often the first sense they rely on because sound travels faster and farther underwater than on land. They key on low-frequency pulsed sounds. So the kind of disruption in sonic waves that bomb caused to their scanning field would have thrown all their systems out of whack, essentially driving them crazy. I've isolated the footage of them both before and during the blackout so you can review my findings. The difference is drastic, undeniable.”

Naomi nodded, trying to process Markham's conclusions. “I've heard of sonic weapons being deployed before, but never anything like a sonic bomb.”

“That's because the research on them is flimsy and unproven at best, purely theoretical but still based on some fairly well-established principles,” Markham explained. “Those sonic weapons you just mentioned?”