Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (44 page)

“Defender.” The young woman half knelt, took Jess’s left hand, and kissed it. She glanced at David. “He’s not on the journey?”

“He will be. I want Victoria to meet him.”

Bakana stood, and David saw the appraising look she gave him. Not so friendly.

She led them into a hall, which ended in the distance with a closed door. Lit by overhead fluorescents, a series of innocuous and simply framed prints of local landscapes graced both rock walls.

Halfway down the hall, Bakana ushered them into a lounge area on the right. They were to wait while she made the arrangements. There were drinks in the cooler. She shut the door behind her.

David studied a remarkably ugly chair covered in what appeared to be orange burlap. “Anything I should know?”

Jess rummaged through the cooler and pulled out two water bottles. “You’re my fiancé.” She held one up questioningly.

David nodded. “Okay . . .”

She tossed him a bottle, then opened one for herself. “It’s the only way to get you in here. Simpler than the truth.”

David twisted off the bottle’s cap and took a long swig. He knew he’d
become too comfortable with lies, but as death drew near, things he used to worry about no longer concerned him.

The rest of the lounge furniture was as ugly as the chair, and at least thirty years old. A ring-stained wooden coffee table was piled with well-thumbed magazines. They ranged from
Modern Documents Management
to the requisite copies of
National Geographic
from decades past. “It’s not what I pictured.”

“They get government inspectors from time to time. Drivers for the trucks that bring in supplies. This is what they expect here.”

“What are you expecting?”

Jess didn’t answer. She drained the last of her water and dropped the empty bottle in a recycling bin.

David sensed more than doubt in Jess now. Fear.

Nathaniel Merrit sat calmly in the chair by the window of his hotel room near Heathrow.

On the desk beside him were the supplies from the clinic—the ones they’d given him, and the ones he’d stolen.

Right now, his attention was on the bottle of co-dydramol tablets. He was waiting to see if he needed more. Pain, the warrior’s mantra went, was weakness leaving the body. But his back had been badly wrenched when he’d slammed into the stone table in the treasure chamber. The flesh over his rib cage on the right side had been slashed by the shooter he had had to kill to escape the collapse. And his ankle . . . he’d sprained that making a simple four-foot jump from one of the openings blown out of the side of the cliff.

It had not been his night.

The only thing that had made the fiasco in Cornwall even remotely acceptable was that he’d caught sight of J.R.’s body in the passageway, by the rock pile, just instants before the ceiling collapsed.

By then, he’d already suited up in the black Nomex jacket and helmet of the first shooter who’d entered the treasure room searching for survivors. Merrit had strangled the man so quickly he’d had no time to shout a warning. He’d dropped the other two shooters on the way out. Dressed as one of their partners, he’d made use of his advantage and opened fire first.

Now, though, with J.R. alive and squealing to the air force, his escape from Cornwall was no longer step one in cleaning the mess Ironwood’s brat had left him.

His arrangement with Ironwood was over, and that was a problem. His ex-employer had resources, and motive, to silence him. To survive, Merrit knew, would require even stronger resources.

Fortunately, he also knew where to find them.

Jess followed Bakana through a cluttered warren of low-walled cubicles.

The administrative facility at the end of the hall was more window dressing. Once every year, for the benefit of occupational health and safety officers and business-license issuers, MacCleirigh Foundation researchers came up from the underground caverns of the Shop to play the parts of office workers. For now, though, the cubicles were silent and empty. Every desk and chair was draped in heavy sheets of plastic, the red dust everywhere.

Bakana carefully pulled the cover from one of the filing cabinets against the back wall. She drew out the middle drawer, and Jess placed her hand inside, palm down, fingers splayed to fit within a set of plastic pegs. A flash of white light. A soft chime. Then a panel in the wall beside the cabinet smoothly moved aside.

Bakana went through first.

The open staircase spiraled downward to another, larger room, equivalent in size to the cave where Jess had parked the Cruiser. At the room’s far end gleamed the huge steel disk of a fifty-ton blast door. It was open to reveal a circular passageway as wide as a two-lane road.

Once through, it was a short walk to a bank of elevators that descended five levels deeper underground. Jess knew that if she had misjudged the extent of Su-Lin’s power over other defenders, it was possible she’d already been declared an enemy of the Family. If anything was going to happen to her, it would be now.

The elevator door whisked open. Cool air washed in. Jess braced for attack.

It didn’t come.

“Such news!” Victoria, Line Claridge, Defender of Canberra, swept Jess into a quick embrace. Her turquoise eyes were as startling as ever in her deep-tanned face. Her white-blond hair was straight and chin length.

Jess relaxed momentarily. Su-Lin hadn’t sent out an alarm. Her cover story about David and marriage, concocted quickly on the plane, only had to hold until they got the sun map images.

“My office?” Victoria suggested. “So you can tell me all about him.”

“Lots to tell,” Jess said.

Victoria winked. “Time for true confessions.”

Victoria’s office was like the workplace of any other academic who had too many projects and too little time. Journals and papers and open books feathered with sticky notes covered both desks, each shelf, and every piece of furniture.

The Defender of Canberra transferred one of those piles from the edge of a dark green leather sofa to the top of another pile already on the floor. Jess settled in as instructed while Victoria took her own chair, checked her laptop, then folded it closed. She stripped off her Velcro-fastened sandals and, with a sigh, lifted her calloused feet up on the only clear corner of her desk.

“Jessie, Su-Lin’s worried about you.”

Su-Lin . . . not David or my marriage.
Jess returned to full alert. “When did you talk to her?”

“A few days ago. She said you went missing in Boston after Florian’s memorial, after saying something about going to the Pacific temple site. Before it’s been secured.”

There was a chance, Jess realized, that Victoria knew exactly what she was doing. There was also a chance that Victoria was merely Su-Lin’s unwitting ally, being used to find out if the new defender might implicate others in her rebellion against the Family.

There was one way to find out. Strike first.

“The Polynesian temple’s been destroyed,” Jess said.

“What?” Victoria swung her legs down. “How?”

“Underwater demolition.”

There was a knock on the door. Bakana was there. She held a tray with a covered china teapot, cups, and a plate of Tim Tams. She looked apologetic, apparently aware she had interrupted something.

Victoria asked her to put the tray down on a relatively stable pile of books, then leave. Bakana closed the door without being asked.

“Was it Ironwood?”

“No,” Jess said. “Su-Lin.” Victoria’s strong-featured face betrayed only bewilderment. That, paired with her convincing shock about the temple’s destruction, gave Jess new hope.

“Why ever would Su-Lin destroy something so valuable? And if she did, how would you know?”

Jess took a deep breath, hoping she wasn’t making a mistake. “Willem told me. Just before he disappeared.”

“But Willem’s in Iceland.”

“He came to Boston for Florian’s memorial.”

Victoria started to say that was against all the rules, then reconsidered. “They were very fond of each other.”

“And Su-Lin didn’t tell him gunmen tried to kill me in Canada, just before—”

“Gunmen?!”

“Then she didn’t tell you, either.”

“When did this happen?”

“Three days after Florian was murdered.”

“Jessie, dear, you’d better tell me everything.”

David woke with a start. He’d nodded off in the ugly orange chair waiting for Jess to return, or for someone else to come for him.

She’d said it’d be impossible for him to see the real underground facility here, but as soon as she’d spent a few minutes speaking with her host, he’d be allowed to enter the first level, where the main living quarters were housed. He could rest there while she used a computer terminal to call up photos of the sun map. She’d also said there would be several astronomers she could contact, funded by MacCleirigh Foundation grants, who’d be able to interpret the arrangement of planets in the meteorite’s inscriptions. That they would know if a particular date could be inferred.

David checked his watch to see how long he’d slept.
An hour and a half?

He stood up, muscles sore and stiff after Cornwall and the forced inactivity of a day spent in planes. His stomach rumbled. He hadn’t had a real meal for days, but the closest thing to food at hand was a can of Coke.

He went to the door, opened it, saw no one in the hall.

“Hello?”

No one answered.

David didn’t know how this place ran, but something wasn’t right. Not for a security-obsessed outfit like Jess’s family.

Coke in hand, he started down the hall toward the closed door at its end. He was guessing that that was where Jess had gone with Bakana.

The door was unlocked when he tried it. He walked into what seemed to be a mothballed office. Everything was wrapped in plastic.

“Jess? Bakana? Hello?”

Silence.

David took another sip of Coke, considering his next move. Then he heard someone in the hall, moving fast.
Finally.

He went back to the door, pulled it open.

The driver of the Land Rover was charging toward him. He had a gun.

David slammed the door shut—

But he’d swung the lightweight door so hard, it banged open again just as fast. The driver fired.