Changeling (24 page)

Breathe
!

She swam back up to the air pocket, breaking through the surface with a splash and a gasp. “Professor?”

She tried to shout it, but her teeth were chattering uncontrollably and she could barely get the word out.

No answer. She searched the top of the air pocket, trying to find the opening or at the very least, the dangling safety line, but found neither.

A cold fist of dread slammed into Jade’s gut. She reached for the rope knotted to her climbing harness and began frantically pulling in the line, even though she knew what she would find. Sure enough, after pulling in twenty feet of sodden rope, she reached the end, which had been severed neatly, as if by a pair of scissors.

“Damn it!”

As she had maneuvered the pieces of the three-dimensional puzzle, reorganizing the stone squares into the ring-like bands, she had inadvertently covered the opening overhead and in so doing, sliced through the safety line. She was cut off from Professor and Shah. Worse, she was trapped inside the sphere, with only one way out.

That wasn’t strictly true. If she moved the stones in the right sequence, she might be able to uncover the opening again and get out, but that would mean trial and error, a time-consuming process, and time was not something she had in abundance—and when it was done, she would have to start the puzzle all again.

No, practically speaking, the only way out was to align the rings, solve the puzzle and open the vault.

She tried to inhale deeply to fill her lungs again, but the cold had left her muscles rigid, and she was only able to take a shallow stuttering breath. It would have to suffice.

She swam back down, attacking the puzzle with frenetic urgency. Shift right. Slide down. Shift right. Slide up.

Breathe!

No. Almost done
.

Shift. Slide. Shift.

Breathe
.

A spasm racked her chest. She blew air into her cheeks then breathed it in, trying to fool her autonomic nervous system. It didn’t really work, but the attempt dislodge the plastic bottle lens over her left eye, and as it drifted away, a rush of frigid water pressed against her eyeball.

Keep going. Almost done
.

Slide, shift, push… And then, she saw that only one more move remained. When she pushed the stone into place, the puzzle would be solved and the pattern of interwoven rings would be formed. What happened after that would be, as Professor had indicated, unpredictable.

In a perfect world, the chamber would drain slowly and a concealed door would open, but Jade doubted her luck would be that good. It was far more likely that the door had been designed to be opened only when the chamber was dry, something that might happen only every thousand years, which mean that either the door would not budge, and she would still be trapped, or the rush of water through the newly opened portal would create a vortex with enough hydraulic pressure to suck her down and conceivably rip her limb from limb or smash her to a pulp against the walls of the vault.

She left the last stone as it was and kicked back up to the air pocket, hoping against hope that she would find Professor staring down at her, irritated but overjoyed to see her, but there was only the smooth wall of the sphere, with two bands of stone, one seemingly passing over the top of the other.

There was only one thing left to do.

She swam down, following the carefully organized bands of stone that now circumscribed the inside of the sphere, until she found the one piece that was still out of place. Without any further hesitation, she swam to it and gave it a final push. She did not wait to see the results, but immediately began kicking her legs for the surface. The sudden maneuver cost her the remaining eye cup, throwing everything into blurry indistinctness, but she kept kicking, racing toward the top of the chamber. Even though she could no longer see the smooth walls of the chamber, she could feel vibrations in the water around her. Something was happening. The interior of the sphere was moving.

She broke the surface with a gasp. The water was rippling all around her, and when she trained her flashlight straight up at the exposed section of the chamber, she saw why. The stone bands representing the Borromean rings were moving, rolling on three axes like a gimbal.

Suddenly, the entire chamber started coming apart. The square sections seemed to drop out of the ceiling, collapsing toward her. She threw up her hands to cover her head, but in that moment, she realized she was no longer floating, but falling. The water around her had disappeared as abruptly as if the entire bottom of the sphere had broken open, creating a whirlpool. Jade barely had time to gasp for air before she was caught in the frothing deluge and flushed away.

“Jade!” Professor hammered
his fist against the smooth stone that had unexpectedly slid over the entrance to the underground chamber, blocking his access to Jade and slicing through the rope that was her only lifeline. His shout was as ineffectual as his pounding. Jade was cut off, beyond his reach.

“Damn it!” he raged, punching the stone again. “I told her this would happen.”

“What’s wrong?” Shah’s voice drifted up the short but cramped passage.

“I don’t know,” Professor replied, and that wasn’t a total lie. “Jade was trying to open the door, but now we can’t get through.”

“What does that mean? Is it some kind of booby trap?”

“I don’t know what it means,” he snapped. Then he took a calming breath. “We’ll just have to wait and see. Jade said she knew how to open it. She’s headstrong, but she’s pretty good with stuff like this.”

“So I’ve noticed.” Shah’s murmured comment was barely audible, and not just because he was speaking from the far end of the passage.

A strange hissing sound, like stone rasping against stone, filled the air, along with a faint but persistent vibration that seemed to be rising up through the rock.

Cave-in?

Professor’s first impulse was to scramble back down the passage, and maybe even take his chances sliding down the sheer limestone face they had climbed, in order to avoid being entombed beneath tons off falling rock, but he fought this urge, and focused his attention instead on identifying the source of the disturbance. A moment later, he realized that the smooth rock blocking the entrance to the submerged chamber was moving. He reached out to it, touching it lightly with a fingertip, and felt it rolling in place like an enormous ball bearing.

What did you do, Jade
?

The tremor intensified, but the sensation of movement against his fingertip vanished, along with the stone that had been blocking the passage. Professor could now feel cold musty air rushing up through the opening. The breeze lasted only a moment, like the last exhalation of a dying man, but it was strong enough to tousle his hair. A few seconds later, the vibrations ceased and all was still.

Professor reached his hand a little further into the gap, felt nothing, and then shone his flashlight into the void. Instead of reflecting off the water that had been there only a few minutes before, the beam revealed what looked like stone steps disappearing down into the earth.

“Jade!” His shout echoed back but there was no answer from the depths.

He felt his pulse quicken, his body leaping to the obvious conclusion even before the thought could fully form in his brain. Jade was gone. Swept away.

“No. She’s alive.” He said it aloud, as if doing so might convince the universe to change its mind.

“What’s happening?” asked Shah.

Professor paid him no heed. He lowered himself through the hole and placed his feet on the steps. Once inside, he could see that the steps were formed of stone blocks, each about twenty-four inches to a side, stacked up to form a descending spiral staircase. There was a wall of tightly joined cut stone blocks to his left, and a yawning chasm, sixteen feet across, to his right, around which the steps coiled like the threads of a screw hole. The walls and steps were damp, but that was the only remaining trace of the water that had earlier filled the chamber.

“Jade!” Professor started down the steps, moving faster than was probably advisable given the unfamiliar environment, calling out to Jade over and over again, always with the same results. The stairs circled once, twice. His best rough guess put him thirty feet below the entrance with no end yet in sight, and no sign of Jade. He completed another orbit, screwing deeper into the earth, then another, and then the descent ended at a flat landing that curled once more around the open pit. At the end of the landing was an opening that led through the wall.

Professor stopped in front of the doorway and shone his light through. The landing was damp like everything else, but the stone floor on the other side of the opening appeared to be bone dry. About ten feet past the opening, a smooth stone wall—all the surfaces looked like burnished concrete rather than natural stone—curved away in either direction.

The absence of any footprints in the dry passage beyond told him Jade had not left by that route. He crossed back to the edge of the landing and leaned over, shining his light into the depths.

“Jade!”

Shah came down the steps. “This place is incredible. No one knows about it?”

Professor continued ignoring the other man. Short of taking a leap of faith into the unknown, there seemed no way to reach the depths below, but someone had gone to the trouble of excavating the chasm, and if he was not wrong, lining it with cement, and that strongly indicated a purpose and possibly another means of accessing the lower reaches. He turned back to the doorway and went through, with Shah just a few steps behind. He decided to go left, but ultimately the choice was irrelevant. The wall and the passage beside it curved around, forming a rotunda that probably would have brought him back to the staircase passage, only he never got that far. Halfway around the ring-shape walk, he spotted the glow of artificial light.

“Jade!”

He sprinted toward the light, and as he came around the bend, he saw a woman standing there. It was not Jade, and she was not alone.

The woman was very attractive, with pale skin and raven black hair, and an almost palpable air of haughtiness. Curiously, despite the fact that the light from the portable electric lamp on the floor behind her could hardly be considered brilliant, she wore dark wraparound sunglasses.

Professor only gave her a passing glance. His attention was on the two men standing to either side of her. He recognized both of them. One was Jordan Kellogg, the man who had introduced himself as the assistant editor of Chameleon International publishing house.

The other man’s face was as familiar to Professor as his own. In fact, it was his own. He wore Professor’s clothes, even had his Omega Seamaster wristwatch and his Explorer fedora.

The two men—the two Changelings—had pistols leveled at him.

“I assume you are armed,” Kellogg said. “Let me assure you, it makes no difference to us whether you live or die, but if it matters to you, I suggest you place your weapon on the ground. Slowly.”

Professor raised his hands. Two-to-one odds were manageable, and he wasn’t afraid to get a little scuffed up, but there was a far more compelling reason for him to stand down. “Do you have Jade? Is she all right?”

Kellogg glanced at Professor’s doppleganger. “I told you she’d figure out how to get in.”

“Fat lot of good it did her,” the other man replied in Professor’s voice. “She got washed down into the waterworks. We’ll probably never find her body.”

While Professor did not grasp the context of the exchange, the implication was easily enough understood. The Changelings did not have Jade.

Which meant there was no reason to continue the conversation.

“What about Jade?” he said again. “Do you know where she is?”

He asked the question only to distract the two men. It was physically impossible to pull a trigger while talking, which meant that as soon as one of the men started to answer, he would draw his own weapon and start firing.

Before either Changeling could speak however, Shah stepped forward. “Gabrielle?”

The woman cocked her head in the direction of his voice. “Atash. I’m pleased that you’re here. I had hoped that you would find your way, though we had expected you to pursue Jade Ihara, not join her. I’m very impressed.”

Shah ignored the praise. “So it’s true. You have been working for…them…all along.”

“I am not working for anyone,” she replied calmly. “They are my family.”

“You used me!” Shah fairly screamed the accusation, stomping forward, heedless of the weapons pointed at him.

Professor caught Shah’s biceps to stop his advance. “Get a grip,” he said, speaking almost as loud as Shah had. “They’ve got guns. You’ll just get yourself killed.”

The woman’s head tilted back and forth, bird-like, confirming what Professor had suspected from the moment he saw her sunglasses. She was blind. That fact seemed a lot less important than the matter of her prior relationship with Shah. He addressed the woman. “Gabrielle is it? What am I saying? That name is probably as fake as everything else about you. I take it you’re the partner he’s been talking about. The one who convinced him to go after Jade?”

The woman inclined her head in what might have been a nod.

“That was a real boneheaded thing to do,” Professor went on. “Especially if you already had somebody on the inside.”

“You’re a military man,” Kellogg said. “You know how lines of communication can sometimes get crossed.”

“You could have gotten yourself killed Kellogg or whatever your real name is.” He took a deep breath, surreptitiously lowering his hands an inch or two. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You three—and all the rest of the Changelings back at the nest—have known about this place…”

He gestured expansively. “This Vault, all along. You’re the self-appointed protectors, making sure that nobody else finds it, right? If someone gets too close, you kill them. Or…” He nodded to Shah. “Trick someone else into doing the dirty work for you. Roche got too close to the truth, so you had to off him. And hey, while you’re at it, set the Muslims up to be the bad guys. Hell, push the right buttons and they’ll line up to deal some jihad on the infidels who insult the Prophet.”

He sensed a subtle shift in Shah’s ire—away from the blind woman and toward him—which given the circumstances wasn’t such a bad thing. If Shah didn’t take it down a notch, he might get them both killed.

“So what it is, exactly? What’s the big deal about this Vault? What’s so important that you murder people and disappear a whole plane full of people?”

The woman—Gabrielle—smiled. “It’s not for you.”

The words sent a chill through him. “Eve said that. What do you mean? What’s not for me?”

Her statement must have been a signal to Kellogg and Professor’s doppelganger. They started forward, pistols raised and gripped in both hands, bodies and arms positioned in a modified isosceles stance that Professor recognized immediately as the tactical shooting position he had learned in the Teams. For the first time since encountering the Changelings, it occurred to Professor that he might have misjudged their ability level. These men had been trained by experts. He could see it in every move they made.

Professor’s duplicate stopped a mere ten feet away, nearly point blank range. Kellogg continued forward, careful to stay out of arm’s reach, and circled alongside Professor. “Your weapon,” he said. “Where is it?”

It was plain that any show of resistance would be suicidal. Professor raised his hands a little higher. “Under my shirttail.”

Kellogg moved out of Professor’s line of sight and then came in close enough to pluck the weapon from its holster. “Is that the only one?”

“Unfortunately,” Professor replied. He felt a tap against his right ankle, then the left; Kellogg verifying that he did not have a backup weapon concealed there.

“Kneel,” Kellogg said. “Hands laced behind your head.”

Professor remained standing. “If you’re going to kill me, just get it over with.”

“I said—”

The woman cut him off. “It’s all right. Let him stand.” She tilted her head toward Professor. “Contrary to what you might thing, we do not shed blood with reckless abandon. And you may yet have some usefulness to us.”

“This should be good.”

She turned to Shah again. “Atash, are you armed?”

“No,” Shah said, and then echoed Professor. “Unfortunately.”

She reached out to him with an open hand. “Join me. I want to show you something.”

Shah glanced uncertainly at Professor. “Show me what?”

“What you came here to see. The Vault. You do want to see it, don’t you?”

“I…” He swallowed. “I don’t know. What’s in it?”

“Only the truth, Atash. Does that frighten you?” She smiled, which did not soften her arrogance in the slightest. “Gerald Roche was wrong. There was no conspiracy to alter the calendar. No fabrication of history to conceal this supposed ‘Phantom Time.’ That’s the truth you want to hear, isn’t it? You need not fear otherwise.”

“The Prophet?”

“Peace be upon him,” she said, sardonically. “Come with me and I will show you the truth about your Prophet.”

“I don’t understand. Is this another one of your tricks?”

“No tricks, Atash.” She stretched her hand toward him again. “This is for you.”