Changeling (16 page)

Jade’s light picked out the geometric shapes and spirals etched upon the walls and ceilings and painted with red ochre, which would no doubt have been of great interest to the mathematician Archimedes, but reminded Jade more of petroglyphs she had seen in the American Southwest. Spirals, she knew, were a symbol of fertility, but also harmony with the natural order of the universe.

The first level was both shallow and relatively small, but the second level, nearly twenty feet below the surface, was where the Hypogeum earned its magnificent reputation. After passing through several spacious chambers, they entered a vast hall, decorated with what had been dubbed “the Monumental Facade.”  The room, with its decorative entrance to the “Holy of Holies,” had become the public face of the Hypogeum, its image adorning posters and postcards. The half-domed chamber had been hewn out with astonishing precision to produce an effect not unlike the Pantheon in Rome, a feat all the more remarkable considering that its craftsman had used primitive flint tools.

The marked route took them next into a room known as “the Snake Pit” surrounding a six-foot deep well believed to have been used for the keeping of snakes, an ancient totem of fertility in cultures around the globe. Thankfully, it had been many thousands of years since a snake had slithered there.

Their destination, the Oracle Room, lay just beyond the Snake Pit. As she entered, Jade immediately sensed the strange acoustic properties of the chamber. The sound of her own footsteps were muted—the closest analogy she could come up with was the sense of being inside a glass jar—but she could hear Kellogg moving with astonishing clarity. Even the creak of his leather shoes was amplified.

She turned a slow circle, playing the light on the ceiling with its vivid red spirals. They almost seemed to be moving whenever she looked away from them. “Turn off your light,” she said, her voice whisper-quiet in her ears. There was no echo.

“Why?” Kellogg’s voice boomed in the enclosure and Jade could feel it vibrating in her bones.

“Just do it.”

He complied, and a moment later, Jade switched hers off as well, plunging them into funereal darkness. She stood motionless, eyes open, waiting to glimpse an infrasound induced hallucination.

Nothing.

“That’s enough of that,” she said, clicking the light back on. She took out her phone and turned it on. Even without the SIM card, this far underground it was useless for communicating with the outside world, but it was still a functional audio playback device. Jade opened a frequency generator app she had downloaded earlier and set it to 110 Hz, the same frequency as the Oracle Room itself, then pressed the play button.

There was no sound, but that was not completely unexpected. When she had played the tone earlier, even at maximum volume, it was barely audible when she put her ear next to the speaker. Although the theoretical low end of the human auditory range was 20 Hertz, many people could not differentiate the very low tones. It was also possible that the room’s unique acoustic design was cancelling out the frequency waves, creating a dampening effect. She moved the setting down to zero, and then began advancing it slowly, adjusting the frequency about ten Hertz every few seconds. It was a frustratingly tedious process and Jade had to fight the urge to simply crank the tone generator up to produce some kind of audible result.

Finally, at about 120 Hz, she heard something, a low hum like the sound of a refrigerator compressor with a discernible pulsing at each wave peak. The sound quickly grew in intensity until, even with the phone held at arm’s length, it was almost painfully loud. A queasy feeling settled in her gut, the sensation almost identical to what she had felt in Peru.

She looked over at Kellogg, saw the discomfort on his face. She managed a smile and mouthed, “It’s working,” then adjusted the tone generator again.

In the corner of her eye, she saw someone moving into the Oracle Room. Her first thought was that their enemies had tracked them down, but when she whipped her head in that direction, there was no one there.

Despite the nausea churning in her gut, Jade broke into a triumphant grin. She advanced the tone again, and the room began to spin.

She glimpsed movement overhead, not another ghost figure, but something else. The red spirals on the ceiling appeared to be spinning like whirlpools draining out of one reality and into another. Suddenly, she felt lighter, as if the swirling vortices were sucking her out of the Oracle Room. She reached down to change the frequency…or perhaps to stop the tone generator altogether…but her hand refused to move and before she could do anything else, the world around her dissolved into darkness and she was swept away.

As a journalist,
Shah was especially appreciative of irony. Gabrielle had cajoled and goaded him relentlessly, appealed to his heritage and his faith, teased him with the promise of her affections—a promise he now realized she never intended to keep—all to transform him into a leader, a new Mahdi to unite the factions of the Islamic world and lead them to greatness. Her scheming had cost her dearly, not just her eyesight but ultimately the respect—the love—Shah had once felt for her. And yet, it had at last borne fruit. Shah was now the leader she had pushed him to become.

A leader of only four perhaps, but great things often arose from small beginnings. Gabrielle was not the only person to suffer lasting, perhaps even permanent damage from the strange light-burst in the Syracuse museum. But four men—five counting him—would suffice. They would put an end to Jade Ihara’s plot to destroy the faith, and when it was finished, these four would tell the rest of the world how he had led them into battle.

The door to the Hypogeum was unlocked, just as Gabrielle had said it would be. He did not know how she knew this, and she refused to explain, just as she refused to explain how she knew that Jade would be there. Her obstinacy had been the final straw.

She had asked to accompany them into the Hypogeum and he had refused—what choice did he have? Her blindness was a liability, but it was her refusal to accede to his leadership—the very thing she had labored to establish—that had really been the deciding factor.

“Atash! Just don’t kill them. Not yet.”

He did not ask her to explain. He knew she would not, and besides, he had no intention of complying. Jade Ihara had to die. Yet, he could not help but wonder why she was so insistent about this matter. In Syracuse, she had argued in favor of keeping Jade alive so that they might interrogate her about her next destination, but clearly, Gabrielle already knew where Jade would go next, which meant Jade had no information that Gabrielle did not already possess.

Perhaps I should be interrogating her
, Shah thought, and did not immediately dismiss the idea. She was nothing to him now.

Her refusal to tell him what was really going on was unacceptable. Nor would he tolerate her making demands of him in front of his chosen warriors. He had left her behind, blind and helpless, unable to follow, unable to do anything.

Shah motioned for the others to put their guns away. He could feel the outline of his own pistol, a gift from one of his men, pressing against the small of his back. He had almost refused the offer. He knew nothing about guns aside from what he had seen in movies, most of which was probably wrong. In fact, he despised guns. As far as he was concerned, the obsession with firearms was one of America’s greatest cultural failures, second only to rampant ethnocentrism. But since he could not very well lead men into battle without a weapon of his own, he had accepted the weapon, and after making sure that it would not accidentally discharge, he had tucked it in his belt where he intended to let it remain. The others were better suited to violence, eager for it even. He would merely direct and observe, as was proper for a general.

He pushed through the door and into the dark interior beyond. “Hello? Anyone here?”

He had only Gabrielle’s assurance that Jade was there, in the Hypogeum, and if that information was wrong, the last thing he needed was to be involved in a random shootout that failed to accomplish its sole objective. Better to risk giving up the element of surprise than unnecessary bloodshed.

There no response however. The building appeared to be deserted. He waved the men inside and turned on the flashlight built into his phone, cupping his hand over it so that only a dim glow was visible.

“Spread out,” he whispered. “Search the area but do not shoot unless you absolutely have to.”

Their grunts of acknowledgement were not reassuring, but it was too late to call the attack off now. He only hoped the building was as empty as it looked. With luck, they had arrived ahead of their target and would be able to lie in wait.

If she’s even coming
, Shah thought, and wondered again where Gabrielle had gotten her information.

He found the entrance to the subterranean complex and waited there for the men to finish their sweep. One by one, they joined him to confirm that they were alone in the museum. He directed one man to stand watch at the front door, and then led the way into the ancient temple.

Despite his best efforts at stealth, the sound of his footfalls on the metal steps sounded like the ringing of an enormous gong. Gabrielle would have told him he was imagining it. For all his anger, he felt her absence acutely. He needed her.

Why was she being so obstinate? What secret was so important that she refused to trust him, after everything they had been through?

He stopped, turned off his light and searched the darkness for several seconds, then resumed moving. He continued in this fashion until, at the threshold of the second level, he heard something, a strange hum that, when he stood perfectly still, made him feel like he was sliding across the floor. Intuitively, he grasped that Jade was connected to whatever was causing this effect.

Stealth was unnecessary now. The hum was almost painfully loud, an assault on the senses that left him feeling nauseated. The urge to turn away, to run and never look back, was nearly overwhelming.

This is a trap. Gabrielle sent us here to die
.

He knew it wasn’t true, but the random thought took root like a dandelion seed.

The bitch. I’ll kill her myself
.

“Keep going,” he rasped, not looking back to see if the others were still with him. As he pushed deeper into the Hypogeum, the feeling began to abate, transforming from panic to something more like euphoria, but his resolve remained unchanged.

“I’ll kill her myself,” he whispered gleefully, squeezing the grip of the pistol that had somehow found its way into his hand. He didn’t know if he was referring to Jade Ihara or Gabrielle Greene. Maybe both.

Yes. Definitely both.

He spied light emanating from one of the carved doorways, rushed toward it with his gun arm extended.

He saw two figures standing in the chamber beyond. The light was behind them, revealing only silhouettes, a man and a woman, but he knew that the pair could only be Jade and her companion, the man she had been with at the Arkimedeion. Gabrielle never mentioned him, and only now did he wonder at that omission. Did she know who he was?

It did not matter. Whomever he was, he would be dead in a few seconds.

Just like Jade Ihara.

Shah stretched his gun arm out and stared down the length of the barrel, lined the iron sights up on Jade’s head, and pulled the trigger.

The vortex drew
Jade up into the darkness, and then suddenly she was…somewhere else.

Forget ghost hallucinations
, she thought. This was a full-on out-of-body experience.

In an instant, she was transported from the Hypogeum and flying through the night sky above Malta, rising…rising…higher and higher into the sky.

It felt like a dream. In fact, she was certain that was exactly what it was. A waking dream. The infrasound frequency had somehow thrown her into REM sleep.

She wondered if Archimedes had experienced something like this. With his genius, the vision had probably been even more fantastic—an Alice in Wonderland-like journey through the landscape of mathematics. Maybe he had seen the true value of pi or the square root of two.

Strangely however, there was nothing familiar about the imagery in this dream. Despite her best efforts to take control, she continued rising skyward, as if strapped to a rocket. Malta was just a dark spot in a darker sea. She could make out the outline of Sicily and the toe of the Italian peninsula. She wondered at how high she was, in both respects. Ten miles up? A hundred?

Am I in outer space
?

She tried to look up, into the emptiness of the sky, but even this small measure of control was denied her. This was not so much a dream as a mind movie, but where was it coming from?

All of the Mediterranean was visible to her now, Europe and North Africa, the curvature of the earth falling away in every direction, and then something changed. She was no longer rising, but moving laterally above the globe as it rolled relentlessly beneath her. It was nothing she had not seen before on television or in computer generated images of the earth as seen from orbit, but the detail of the landscape was astonishing. Jade had never really paid close attention, but evidently her subconscious had recorded every minor knob of rock jutting from the sea, every fjord and mountain summit.

The Iberian Peninsula passed beneath her, and then the Strait of Gibraltar. The great gray expanse of the Atlantic crawled beneath her and then something like a great fiery phoenix rose into view above the Western horizon.

She was chasing the sun.

The Atlantic crossing seemed to take forever, though the same journey that she was making in minutes would take hours by jet airplane. She wondered how much time had passed in the Hypogeum, and to what destination Kellogg’s dreams had taken him.

Land masses came into view, nothing recognizable, but she knew enough about geography to assume that she was seeing the islands of the Caribbean. They too passed beneath her as she continued west, toward the blazing orb of the sun. More land now, and no ocean beyond. North America, Mexico perhaps? No, that great brown smudge had to be the Mississippi River pouring into the Gulf.

The landscape began to make a little more sense now. The sea of brown earth flatter even than the Atlantic Ocean had to be Texas. The southern extremity of the Continental Divide and a patch of white gypsum sand, like snow in the middle of the black desert—New Mexico. She knew this country well, had flown over it dozens of times. There was the Mogollon Rim, the great chasm of the Grand Canyon….

Now she was descending, falling from the sky. Falling towards….

Why am I seeing this
?

For the first time since the journey began, it occurred to her that she might have been wrong about everything. This was not a dream, not the product of infrasound and her fevered imagination.

The Hypogeum was showing her the route to a destination, just as it had shown Archimedes two thousand years before. A specific place, and there, a door with a fantastic mechanical lock that could only be opened….

Roche had been wrong. Paolo and his Freemason brethren, too. The Hypogeum was not the vault. It was the map that showed the way to the vault.

The very idea was so preposterous that, if she had not been experiencing it for herself, she would have dismissed it out of hand. The Oracle Room had been created in such a way as to stimulate specific regions of the human brain to produce exactly this result. Yet, what was so strange about that? Audio and video recordings were nothing more than specific frequencies of electromagnetic energy, easily rendered into digital patterns, and then reconstituted into light and sound. Couldn’t the same thing be done to the human brain?

It really is a mind movie
.

The door to the vault appeared, a circular chamber ringed by circles that turned this way and that, sometimes appearing to be linked like the Olympic rings, but somehow never crossing.

I know where this is
, Jade thought.

Suddenly the image before her fractured, as if someone had thrown an enormous rock through the television screen in her mind, and Jade was wrenched out of the sublime vision and into the chaos of reality.

Shah’s bullet missed
Jade by a country mile, which was not a completely unexpected outcome given his inexperience. He had thought of it as more a signal for his men to open fire than an actual attack. In the final accounting, it would not matter whose bullet actually killed Jade; only that he had fired first.

But no other shots were fired.

Just as the mirror array in the Archimedes museum had focused the spotlight into a searing ray of heat, the unique shape of the Oracle Room had focused the report of the pistol into a deafening sonic assault that brought everyone in the chamber to their knees. He dropped the pistol, clapped his hands to his head as if he might squeeze the noise out of his skull. He thought his head might actually come apart if he let go.

The effect reached its agonizing climax almost immediately and then died away as quickly as the echoes of the shot itself, but recovering from the staggering decibel levels took considerably longer. As a still-grimacing Shah groped for both his light and his gun, he glimpsed a pair of figures—Jade and the other man—making a mad dash past the gunmen.

“No!” Shah rasped. “Not again.”

His fumbling fingers found the gun. He whirled around, trying to line up another shot, but immediately realized the foolishness of such an action. “Hold your—”

One of his men fired at the moving targets and another freight train of agony slammed through Shah’s head.

“Damn it!”

Yet, somehow, the second episode wasn’t quite as bad as the first. Maybe the damage to his hearing had inoculated him against further pain. He endured the pain with a grimace and kept his eyes open long enough to see Jade go down.