The Sacred Vault (39 page)

‘But how would they get past all the security?’ Eddie asked.

‘I don’t know, God damn it!’ He raised an eyebrow at her snappish reply. ‘Sorry, I’m sorry.’ She let out a frustrated breath. ‘I’m just pissed they got away. And we’ve got no idea where they’ve gone.’

‘Actually, we do.’ They looked round to see Kit, his sprained arm in a sling, limp into the room on a crutch. Behind him were Mac, who smiled broadly on seeing the couple, and another man, thin-faced with a drooping moustache, who appeared considerably less pleased at the sight of them - or of Eddie, at least.

‘Kit!’ Nina cried, jumping up. ‘Are you okay?’

‘The doctor said I will mend,’ said the Indian. He gave his bandaged arm a rueful look. ‘Eventually.’

She smiled, then greeted Mac warmly before giving the moustachioed man a peck on the cheek. ‘And Peter. Good to see you again.’

‘You too, Nina,’ he replied, before regarding Eddie with disdain. ‘Chase. Hello.’

‘Alderley,’ Eddie replied, with equal antipathy.

‘So,’ said the MI6 officer, ‘how was your party?’

Nina looked apologetic. ‘I am
so
sorry you didn’t get your invitation, Peter.
Somebody
,’ she glared at Eddie, ‘made a hash of things.’

‘Completely by accident,’ Eddie told him, not quite hiding a smile. ‘I was gutted that you weren’t there, obviously.’

‘Obviously,’ said Alderley, stone-faced. Mac chuckled.

‘In that case, you can apologise to Peter for the, uh, mix-up, can’t you?’ said Nina. When Eddie didn’t reply immediately, she jabbed him with an elbow. ‘Can’t you?’

‘I suppose,’ Eddie said, with a complete lack of contrition.

‘Sorry that you couldn’t come to our wedding do and drone on about restoring your Ford Capri, Alderley.’

Another jab. ‘Eddie!’

‘That’s okay,’ said Alderley sarcastically. ‘It’s the thought that counts. Anyway, I’ve got some information about your friends the Khoils.’ He put a briefcase on the desk, taking out several manila folders and a laptop. ‘While MI6 doesn’t have any specifically actionable intelligence on them, what Mac told me was enough to raise flags. And with the G20 summit going on, any potential threat has to be investigated.’

‘What did you find?’ Nina asked.

‘A lot of financial activity - hardly surprising considering the Khoils own a multinational company, but our banking boffins are always looking for suspicious patterns. They’ve been setting up various . . . well, they’ve described them as “protected archives”, but you could call them bunkers, I suppose. Isolated facilities with everything needed for long-term survival - exactly the kind of thing you’d want if you planned to spark off World War Three. An old salt mine in Montana, something in Australia, Mongolia - and a place in Greenland, which is, according to their flightplan, where they’re going.’

Nina turned to Kit. ‘Can you put out a warrant on them?’

‘I’m afraid not. At the moment, we don’t have enough direct evidence to issue a red notice. Based on our statements there is enough to issue a green notice, but that’s just a warning to local police of possible criminal activity, not a confirmation.’

‘Why the hell would they want to go to Greenland?’ Eddie hooted. ‘There’s not a lot there.’

‘That might be why they’ve gone,’ said Nina, a possibility striking her. ‘Pramesh said one of the reasons they stole those treasures was to protect them while everything else collapses. We saw in Iraq what happened to the country’s museums - they were looted, and most of the contents still haven’t been found. Imagine that on a global scale! But if you wanted to keep something absolutely safe, you’d put it as far away from civilisation as possible - like that seed store in Norway, the Doomsday Vault. Maybe they’re hiding everything they’ve stolen in Greenland. Peter, do you know exactly what kind of facility they have there?’

Already flicked through the folders, then shook his head. ‘Some decommissioned Cold War ice station. I don’t have the details.’

‘If that’s their bolt-hole, there must be some significance to it.’ She gestured at the laptop. ‘Can I use your computer?’

Alderley nodded, and Nina opened the machine. ‘What are you looking for?’ Mac asked.

‘Whatever they’re doing up there.’

‘How are you going to find that out?’ Alderley asked dubiously.

She went to the web browser - and loaded the Qexia search engine. ‘To quote their own commercials,’ she said with a grin, ‘just ask.’

It took only a minute for the network of links to produce a result that surprised everyone in the room. ‘
That’s
his data centre?’ said Eddie, reading the news article, translated from the Danish, that accompanied a picture of Khoil standing before a bizarre structure. ‘Bloody hell. And I thought his house was over the top.’

‘It says it’s over a hundred miles from the nearest settlement,’ said Nina. ‘If you wanted to keep something hidden, it’s a good place.’

‘So what do we do? Fly up there and knock?’

‘If Interpol find anything to tie the Khoils to the Vault of Shiva, then yes - it directly connects them to the attempted theft of the Talonor Codex in San Francisco. As soon as they have something, they can issue an arrest warrant. Am I right, Kit?’

‘The Indian government is flying a team to Mount Kedarnath first thing tomorrow,’ Kit replied. ‘There are two crashed helicopters there. If their tail numbers match the ones hired by the Khoils’ company, we have our connection. We can upgrade the green notice to a red, and work with the Greenland police to search’ - he indicated the strange building on the laptop screen - ‘this place.’

‘Will you be going?’ Nina asked.

He tapped the crutch on the floor. ‘I don’t think so. But we will still need an expert to identify any artefacts that might be found there. If you want to go.’

‘Absolutely,’ said Nina immediately.

‘That wasn’t what I was going to say,’ Eddie grumbled, only half joking. ‘We just got back from the Himalayas, and now you want to go somewhere even colder?’

‘It’ll be worth it to see the expression on the Khoils’ faces when they get arrested.’ She turned to Alderley. ‘Is there anything else you can do to protect the summit in the meantime?’

‘Without any specific threat, all I can do is try to persuade the Indians to raise the security alert level - and it’s already pretty high. But . . .’ He thought for a moment, rubbing his moustache. ‘All the countries at the G20 have intelligence officers in their delegations - my opposite numbers, you could say. I can have quiet words with them, try to get them to take a gander at the Khoils for themselves. If we pool information, we might be able to find something actionable.’

‘How long will it take, though?’ asked Nina. ‘The summit starts tomorrow.’

‘Yeah,’ Eddie added. ‘It won’t help much if whatever Khoil’s planning happens while you’re swanning about at some spooks’ cocktail party.’

‘That’s not
quite
what I’ll be doing,’ said Alderley irritably. ‘As a matter of fact, I was going to suggest that Mac comes with me to talk to some of these people. And Mr Jindal, too. Getting first-hand accounts from reliable sources can speed things up enormously.’

‘Will you be able to get us security clearance for the summit?’ Mac asked.

‘For an MI6 adviser and an Interpol officer? No problem. It’s not as though you’re disreputable types.’ He looked directly at Eddie, who mouthed an obscenity.

‘I’m happy to help as much as I can,’ said Kit.

‘Great. I’ll make the arrangements.’ He took out his phone. Mac stepped forward to speak to Nina and Eddie. ‘So, off to Greenland? Rather you than me. One of the best things about retiring from the Regiment was knowing that I’d never have to spend another minute on a glacier.’

‘Funny, I thought that too,’ said Eddie. ‘Didn’t quite work out.’

The Scot smiled. ‘Well, best of luck. And wrap up warm.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Nina assured him. ‘I’m not planning to spend one second longer than I have to in the cold!’

 

N
ina gazed out of the porthole of the de Havilland Twin Otter aircraft at the landscape ten thousand feet below. It was an unbroken, empty swathe of snow, and in the near-eternal night of the Arctic winter there should have been nothing to see . . . but instead, it was one of the most amazing natural sights she had ever set eyes upon.

The sky was alive with the shimmering glow of the aurora borealis, green and red and pink lights coiling across the dark dome above. The blank snowscape became a giant canvas, a piece of abstract expressionism on a grand scale as colours were poured over it from the heavens. ‘Eddie,’ she said excitedly. ‘You’ve got to see this.’

Eddie paused in his discussion with Walther Probst, Interpol’s Tactical Liaison Officer, to glance through another window, ‘Not bad,’ he grunted, turning back to the German.

‘That’s all you’ve got to say? “Not bad”?’

‘I’ve seen it before. The SAS does Arctic training in Norway. After a couple of days freezing your arse off, you stop noticing it. Actually, it’s kind of a pain because it makes you easier to see.’

‘I married a philistine,’ she complained before joining the two men. ‘How long till we get there?’

‘About ten minutes,’ said Probst. The de Havilland was nearing the end of its long northeasterly flight from Greenland’s capital of Nuuk, traversing the vast empty wastes of the huge island’s central glaciers. Its destination was, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere.

As Kit had expected, the tail numbers of the two wrecked helicopters on Mount Kedarnath confirmed that the Khoils’ company had indeed hired them. As a result, he had convinced Interpol to issue a red notice on the Khoils - and now it was going to be enacted.

There were two officers of the Rigspolitiet, the Danish police service, aboard the plane, but their presence was largely a formality; Probst’s team of eight men, all armed and wearing body armour beneath their Arctic clothing, would carry out the actual mission. The objectives were simple - serve the warrant, arrest the Khoils for extradition to Interpol headquarters in Lyon, and search for evidence linking them to the artefact thefts. No advance warning had been sent ahead; the hope was that by the time their lawyers were able to take action, the Khoils would already be on their way to France.

The final preparations were being made, the team examining pictures of the building they would be searching. ‘What
is
this place?’ one of the men asked.

‘It used to be an American radar station,’ said Nina, having found the background on the giant structure known only as DYE-A unexpectedly interesting, a piece of modern-day archaeological research. ‘Part of a chain going right the way from the Atlantic coast of Greenland across Canada to Alaska. There were four others like it in Greenland, but this one was also part of a secret operation called Project Iceworm, where they tried to hide nuclear missile bases under the ice.’

‘And everyone thought it was the Russians who were supposed to be sneaky,’ said Eddie, raising a few chuckles from those team members old enough to remember the Cold War.

‘It didn’t work out at the other sites because the glaciers weren’t stable enough,’ Nina continued. ‘The tunnels they built collapsed after a few years. DYE-A was the only place where they stayed intact, because it’s sited above an extinct volcano; the ice is trapped inside the caldera and can’t move. So they built an emergency bunker there as well, a sort of backup NORAD where they could keep running World War Three even if everywhere else got nuked. But it was never used. At least, not by America.’

‘You think the Khoils are planning to use this bunker as a hideout?’ asked Probst.

‘It’s definitely a possibility. It was designed to support people for years, if necessary.’

The German indicated a locker at the rear of the cabin where the team’s weapons were stowed. ‘Okay. As soon as we land, collect arms, and we will go to the building. Our friends from the Rigspolitiet will issue the warrant - we will make sure they are not, ah, obstructed in their duties.’ A small ripple of laughter.

The rasp of the propellers changed as the plane started its descent. ‘Better strap in,’ Eddie told Nina. He sat on one of a pair of rear-facing seats at the front of the cabin, Nina beside him. Outside the window, the spectacular auroral display played across the wings.

 

Pramesh Khoil stood in the eye of a hurricane of information. The infotarium around him, its hundreds of screens flashing at a dizzying rate, was a larger version of the one in Bangalore, constructed on a scale to match the huge chamber topping the former early warning station. The fifty-five-foot-high geodesic dome had once housed one of DYE-A’s three massive radar antennas; now, it was his command centre. He was raised twenty feet on a circular platform, a staircase curling down to a lower elevated walkway ringing it, from where two more sets of steps descended to the floor. Directly above him, hanging from the domed ceiling, was a large rig housing projectors for the biggest screens. A small lectern at the platform’s edge contained the sensors for the gestural control system.

Despite the visual overload, Khoil’s attention was focused on three screens in particular. One showed mostly darkness, the lights of a city seen from the air glinting like gems on black velvet; beside it, the same view was repeated with the benefit of night vision, the cityscape rendered in ghostly shades of green. Both giant projection screens were overlaid with the graphics of an aerial head-up display, an artificial horizon showing the aircraft’s course and speed, altitude and attitude.

The third, smaller LCD screen was a live feed from a news network. The President and Prime Minister of India stood on a red carpet at the majestic Rashtrapati Bhavan, the President’s official residence in Delhi, greeting the German Chancellor. The leaders of the world’s most powerful nations were assembling for the G20 summit, meeting for the evening’s opening ceremony and state banquet before the conference proper began the next day.

But, Khoil knew, there would be no next day for the attendees. The world was about to change for ever. The corrupt and decadent Kali Yuga would end, and a new, purified cycle of existence would begin.

Tonight.

Vanita stood beside him, trying to shut out the visual distraction of the other screens to concentrate on the news feed. ‘How much longer?’ she asked. ‘Are they all there?’

‘Not yet,’ said Khoil. He held out his right hand with the palm flat, fingers slightly opened, and tilted it. On the two main screens, the image of the city followed suit, the speed of the aircraft’s turn increasing slightly. ‘Be patient, my beloved.’

‘I
am
patient,’ she insisted, tight-lipped. ‘But it’s frustrating, waiting on . . .
politicians
!’ She almost spat the word, her earrings jingling.

Khoil lowered his hand, the artificial horizons levelling automatically. ‘It will not be long now. Just another—’

A trilling sound interrupted him. ‘What’s that?’ Vanita demanded. ‘A security alert.’ A gesture, and Zec’s face appeared on one of the screens. ‘What is it?’ he asked the Bosnian.

‘Radar has picked up a plane,’ Zec told him. ‘About five minutes out - and descending.’

Khoil immediately raised both hands, fingers playing a silent concerto in the air as virtual keyboards flashed up. A radar tracking display appeared, showing the intruder’s course. A dotted line predicted its final destination: DYE-A’s long ice runway. A flick of a finger, and the aircraft’s identity was revealed, its transponder code cross-checked in a millisecond against Qexia’s vast database. ‘A government aircraft,’ he said. ‘But they would not turn up unannounced, unless . . .’ His gaze snapped back to Zec’s image. ‘Jam its radio! Shoot it down - and send a team to eliminate any survivors!’

 

The de Havilland shuddered, buffeted by the winds sweeping across the ice plain. Nina grabbed Eddie’s hand. ‘Ow,’ he complained.

‘What?’

‘Bloody nails, digging into me!’ He pulled open her clenched fingers.

‘I’m just nervous - we’re about to land on a glacier hundreds of miles from anywhere, and I’m pretty sure we won’t get a warm welcome.’

‘Oh, come on. You’ve been to the Antarctic - this is like Central Park in comparison. Besides, we’ve got all these guys and their guns on our side - and the Khoils don’t even know we’re coming.’

Shouts of alarm in Danish from the cockpit, the plane banking sharply—

A bright flash outside the windows - then a hole burst open in the fuselage with an earsplitting bang and the shriek of shredding metal. One of the cops was hit in the head by shrapnel, a splash of blood flying across the cabin.

The plane dropped, loose items tumbling in freefall as a freezing wind screamed through the rent in the hull. One of Probst’s men had not fastened his seat belt - he was dragged through the torn hole, the jagged metal ripping his clothing and flesh before the slipstream snatched him away.

Another light outside, the orange flicker of flames. The engine was on fire. The de Havilland lurched, the rasp of its remaining propeller rising as the pilots increased power. ‘What the hell’s happening?’ Nina shrieked.

Eddie clutched his armrests. ‘A missile! Those fuckers are trying to shoot us down!’ He twisted to look into the cockpit. The co-pilot yelled into his headset, declaring a Mayday - but from his expression was getting no reply. Beside him, the pilot struggled with the controls. The plane was dropping fast, nose angled downwards. Through the cockpit windows, Eddie saw a light in the distance, a glowing blue sphere on the snow.

DYE-A. The Khoils’ base. They would crash within sight of it.

A loud whine and a shrill grind of metal ran through the cabin as the pilot extended the wing flaps. The de Havilland’s dive started to level out. ‘Can you land?’ Eddie shouted.

Panic cracked the co-pilot’s mask of professionalism. ‘We can’t make the runway! Crash positions! Brace for impact!’

‘Oh, shit,’ Eddie gasped. He faced the cabin, relaying the instruction to the others before turning to the terrified Nina, who was leaning forward with her hands on the back of her head. ‘No, no!’ he said, pulling her upright. ‘We’re facing backwards - crash position’s different. Sit up straight, keep your back against the seat. Sit on your hands so they don’t flap about.’ He demonstrated.

She followed his example. ‘Eddie, I’m scared!’

Eddie tried to think of something reassuring to say, but all he could manage was ‘I’m not fucking thrilled about it either!’ He glanced sideways, seeing the aurora-lit landscape rising to meet them. A cluster of lights rolled past the windows - they had passed the radar station. He looked back at Nina, meeting her frightened eyes. ‘Stay with me-’

‘Brace! Brace!
Brace!
’ screamed the co-pilot. The engine’s snarl echoed off the ice as the plane reached the ground . . .

The de Havilland hit. Hard.

The landing gear, fitted with skis for a touchdown in snow, collapsed. One of the struts stabbed upwards into the cabin and impaled an Interpol agent. The shock of impact pounded through the seats as the plane slammed down on its belly, skidding across the glacier in a huge spray of ice. Another agent’s seat belt snapped, flinging him across the cabin to crack headfirst against the wall.

Deceleration pressed Nina and Eddie into their seats, vibration battering them. Metal cracked, something wrenching away from the hull’s underside with a horrible screech—

The entire fuselage was ripped in half behind the wings. Two men, strapped helplessly into their seats, were yanked backwards as the floor was torn out from beneath them - and the tail section mowed them down. Its jagged leading edge gouged into the ice, making it tumble as it fell away behind.

More seats broke loose and spun into the trail of debris, another man screaming as he was thrown into the night. Nina gripped her seat as tightly as she could, eyes closed in terror.

The front section tipped over as it continued its uncontrollable skid, the undamaged wing dropping towards the ice - and stabbing into it. The sudden drag spun the fuselage round - then the entire wing was abruptly torn away at its root, wrenching a huge chunk of the ceiling with it. The weight of the remaining wing dragged that side down. Another slam of impact as the wingtip hit the ice, a crunching groan of metal as the wing buckled . . . and the plane finally bumped to a stop as the wrecked engine dug into the ice like an anchor.

The silence was so sudden that for a moment Nina, eyes still squeezed closed, thought she was dead. It wasn’t until she managed to draw a breath that she convinced herself otherwise.

Even that breath told her she was not out of danger. The air was bitingly cold - and laden with the heavy stench of aviation fuel. She opened her eyes. To her surprise, some of the emergency lights in the remains of the cabin were still glowing.

The scene they illuminated, however, was not one she wanted to see. A member of the Interpol team was sprawled over a broken seat, a jagged metal rod impaling his neck. Probst was still alive, breath steaming from his mouth, but from the unnatural angle of his foot it was certain that he had broken his ankle. The agent beside him was also breathing, apparently unconscious. The surviving cop was strapped in his seat facing her, a deep cut on his cheek. He groaned softly.

No sound from the seat beside her, though, no billowing condensation in the cold air. Nina almost didn’t dare turn her head to see what had happened to her husband - and when she did, she felt a sharp stab of whiplash pain. But she forced herself to look round . . .

Eddie was slumped in his seat, eyes closed, blood round his mouth.

Not breathing.

‘Eddie?’ she said, voice quavering. No answer, no movement. She reached out to touch his face, but stopped just short, afraid that she would find no warmth. ‘Eddie? Are you . . .’