The Devil Colony (52 page)

Mitchell Waldorf.

The traitor turned toward the vehicle, but Monk was one step ahead of him. From his perch, he took out the truck’s tires and drove Waldorf back from the vehicle. If they could capture him alive—a Guild operative buried deep in the government—he could prove to be invaluable, a resource capable of exposing much about the workings of the organization.

Waldorf must have realized the same thing.

He lifted a pistol to his chin.

Gray swore, goosed the backhoe for more speed. Seichan ran toward him. Waldorf smiled and shouted at them cryptically: “This isn’t over!”

The single pistol shot rang brightly.

The top of the man’s head erupted in a blast of skull and brain matter. The body slumped to the pavement.

Certainly looks over to me.

Still, the sight of the man’s last smile stayed with Gray. A cold fear settled in his gut. What did the bastard mean?

7:19
A.M.

Ten minutes later, Gray and the others were speeding down the Natchez Trace Parkway in the second Humvee they’d stolen that day. They’d taken one of the assault team’s vehicles, figuring they’d be less likely to be bothered that way. Plus, they needed the extra room.

Monk lay sprawled across the backseat, stripped to the waist, his belly bandaged in a pressure wrap from an emergency medical kit Gray had found in the back of the Army vehicle. Apparently the assault team had been expecting some injuries. He’d also found a morphine stick and jabbed Monk in the thigh with it.

His friend’s eyes already had a happy glaze around their edges.

Seichan, with her cuts and lacerations taped, manned the wheel, leaving Gray to examine the buffalo hide. He’d fetched it from the grave before leaving. The leather was brittle, but he was able to unfold it, revealing an image of a riotous battle dyed into the skin, showing Indians in the midst of waging a great war. Thousands of arrows flew, each delicately but indelibly tattooed into the skin. Elsewhere, pueblos tumbled from cliffs. Faces, feathered and painted, screamed.

Gray remembered Kat’s report from Painter, about the destruction of the Anasazi following the theft of sacred totems from the
Tawtsee’untsaw Pootseev.
Was that slaughter—that genocide—being memorialized on this buffalo skin?

This raised a larger question.

Gray had the buffalo hide open to the middle, spread over his lap. A large section was missing. He felt the surface with his fingers. It was much rougher.

“Lewis scraped this part of the artwork off the hide,” Gray said.

“Why?” Seichan asked.

“He’s written something here in the blank space.”

He stared down at the meticulous lines of script, flowing in a large swatch down the middle. While everyone was tending his or her wounds, he had sponged off the old blood that still covered most of the hide. The iron in the hemoglobin had stained the skin, but the words he found there were still legible.

“Only it makes no sense,” he said. “It’s just a jumble of letters. Either it’s a code, or Lewis really had gone mad.”

Seichan glanced down at the hide, then back to the road. “Didn’t Heisman say Lewis and Jefferson communicated in code? That they exchanged messages in their own private cipher.”

“That’s true.”

Gray pictured Lewis dying over that long night, waiting for Mrs. Grinder to find him. He had plenty of time to write this last message to the world, but what did it contain? Did it name his killer? Was it his last will and testament?

Gray’s fingers again rubbed the tough hide, where it had been crudely abraded. What did Lewis erase here? Along the edges, bits of what looked like a map remained: a corner of a river coursing down a mountain, some pass through another range, a piece of a lake. Was this a more detailed map of the terrain around the lost city of the
Tawtsee’untsaw Pootseev
? Did the gold map point to the general position, while this dyed rendition offered a more precise location? Is that how Fortescue was able to find it out west—that is, if he did in fact find it?

Gray put the bits together in his head. “I think the traitor, General Wilkinson, killed Lewis for the gold tablet in his possession, but he never knew about the significance of the buffalo hide. After his assassination, Lewis didn’t want it to fall into the wrong hands, so he scraped it clean and left this last cryptic message to the world. He used his own blood and body to hide it.”

“Why hide it?”

“Perhaps to keep his murderer from knowing he’d been named. Maybe he hoped the hide would reach Jefferson with his other possessions, and if not, he’d at least leave a final testament to the future. We may never know. All we know is that there’s
no
map here to help Painter.”

Gray’s disposable phone rang. He picked it up. “Kat?”

“How’s Monk doing?” she asked, trying to sound strong but cracking at the edges.

“Sleeping like a baby,” he assured her.

Gray had already called her as they set off down the road, updating their situation. He’d given her a quick debriefing about the map.

“I have a jet waiting for you at a private airfield near Columbia,” she said.

“Good. We should be there in a few minutes. But what about Seichan? Isn’t everyone and their brother hunting her?”

“With what’s going on in Yellowstone, no one is concerned with the three of you any longer, especially as I’ve passed on an intelligence briefing implicating Waldorf, explaining how the situation at Fort Knox was an inside job orchestrated by him, and how he’d fabricated his story of terrorists to cover his own actions. That should buy you all enough clearance to get back home.”

“We’ll be there as quickly as we can.” Gray had one other concern. “Have you figured out how Waldorf managed to set up that ambush? How he knew we’d be digging up Lewis’s body? As far as I know, only you and Eric Heisman knew about it. Possibly also the curator’s assistant, Sharyn.”

“As far as I can tell, they’re both clear. And to be honest, with everything that’s happening so fast, some bit of intel may have reached the wrong ears. And you know the Guild has ears everywhere.” Kat sighed. “What about you? Did you make any further progress with the buffalo hide?”

“No. Nothing that can help Painter. I’m afraid he’s on his own from here.”

Chapter 39

June 1, 5:20
A.M.
Yellowstone National Park

Kai moved through the forest of otherworldly cones with her shadow chained to her. Ashanda followed so quietly behind, even the handcuffs were silent. Despite the bomb on Kai’s wrist, the woman’s presence was reassuring in some odd way.

Maybe it’s some sort of Stockholm-syndrome kind of thing,
Kai thought.

But she sensed that it was more than that. She knew the woman did Rafael’s bidding, but there was no enmity in her. In many ways, the woman was as much a prisoner as Kai herself. Weren’t they both wearing handcuffs? Plus Kai had to admit that there was a kind of simplicity and beauty in Ashanda’s quietness, and in the soft sound of her humming that Kai occasionally overheard—filled always with that sadness under the surface.

Still, Kai could never shed the weight of the bomb on her wrist. It grew heavier with each step, a constant reminder of the danger she was in.

Seeking diversion, she wandered the forest with Ashanda. The world had less than an hour of life remaining to it now. The soldiers from both sides had begun to drift back, empty-handed, after searching their sections of the cliffs.

The words of Hank Kanosh stayed with her, a puzzle to distract.

Where the wolf and eagle stare.

Walking through the forest with these words in her mind, she finally saw it, from the right angle, with the sun just rising. She froze so fast that Ashanda bumped into her, a rare lapse in the African woman’s sharp reflexes.

“Professor Kanosh! Uncle Crowe!”

The two men lifted their heads from where they were bowed.

“Come here!” Kai waved her arm, pulling up short, forgetting for the moment that her limb was handcuffed, but her urgency drew the men, along with Rafael.

“What is it?” Hank asked.

She pointed to the six-foot geyserite cone in front of her. It rose like a pillar. “Look at the top, how it’s broken into two sharp points . . .
like ears!
. . . and below it, that thick knob of rock sticking out . . . doesn’t that look like a dog’s
muzzle
?”

“She’s right,” Hank said, and stepped closer. “The wolf and eagle are common Indian totems. And these natural pillars are like
stone
totem poles. Feel this.”

Uncle Crowe reached his hand up. “They’ve been carved,” he said, awed.

Hank ran a finger down the pillar. “But over time, new accretions of minerals have coated the surface, blurring the imagery.”

Rafael spun, leaning on his cane. “We must find that eagle.”

Over the next ten minutes, both teams scoured the stone forest. But none of the pillars looked birdlike in any way. The flurry of searching died down to head-scratching and plodding feet.

“We’re wasting time,” Rafael said. “Maybe we should just search in the direction of the wolf,
non
?”

By now, Kai had made a roundabout hike through the geothermal cones and ended up where she started. She stepped in front of the wolf pillar, putting her back to it, and gazed outward across the valley. The wolf had a long stare. It stretched clear across the longest axis of the basin, eventually striking a distant cliff.

She pointed toward it. “Did anyone search—”

Jordan cried out, gasping in surprise. “Over here!”

She turned, along with everyone else. Jordan stood before an ordinary column of bumpy rock. It looked nothing like an eagle. But he bent down into the meadow grasses and picked up a fluted chunk of rock. He fitted it to the pillar’s side, from which it must have broken off. Once the piece was in place, a slight fluting on the other side paired up with it, forming a pair of wings.

Jordan motioned up. “That crest of flowstone near the top, pointed down, could be a beak.” He pantomimed by lowering his chin to his chest and looking down his nose.

“It’s the second totem pole!” Hank said.

Jordan stared across at Kai, smiling broadly, silently communicating a message:
We both found one
.

Kai returned to her post in front of the wolf and waved for Jordan to do the same. Once in position, she began to walk in the direction of the wolf’s stare. Jordan followed the eagle’s gaze. Step by step, they continued out across the field, slowly approaching each other, attempting to determine the spot where the stares of the two totems met.

Everyone followed.

Forty yards out, Kai reached out her free arm and took Jordan’s hand, the two of them coming together at last. They stood before another cone. Standing four feet high and about three feet wide, it was squat and unremarkable looking, resembling nothing so much as a fat mushroom cap.

“I don’t understand,” Rafael said.

The Asian geologist came forward and examined the structure from all sides. “Looks like any of the others.” He placed his palms atop it and stayed in this position for several breaths. “But it’s not vibrating. Even the dormant ones have a palpable tremor to them.”

“What does that mean?” Kai said.

He pronounced his judgment. “This is fake.”

5:38
A.M.

Full sunrise brightened the day, but not their moods.

“Why don’t we just blow it up?” Kowalski asked.

“It may come to that, but let’s give Hank and Chin at least a minute to finish their examination.”

Still, Painter had to consider Kowalski’s option. They had roughly forty minutes until the valley exploded.

“Just in case,” Painter asked, “do you have any C4 with you?”

He had asked Kowalski to secure some of the explosive for the flight here, in case they needed to blow their way into a tunnel or passage. But the man had come here with no satchel or pack.

“I have a little,” Kowalski admitted. He stepped back and flared out both sides of his ankle-length duster, revealing a vest covered in cubes of C4.

“You call that a little?”

Kowalski glanced down. “Yeah. Should I have brought more?”

Over by the mushroom rock, Hank and Chin stood up together.

Hank gave their assessment. “We think it’s meant to act like a plug, perhaps symbolic of an infant’s umbilical cord. Either way, we need four strong men to hook their arms around that lip—which I believe is the very reason it’s there—and lift straight up.”

Kowalski volunteered, as did Major Ryan, Bern, and Chin.

Bending at the knee, the men circled the stone and linked arms.

“The rock is porous,” Chin said. “Hopefully we can lift it free.”

On a count of three, they all heaved up. From the strain on their faces, the geologist’s assessment was proving questionable. But then a grating metallic sound groaned from the earth. The stone plug rose in the men’s arms. With the stopper finally loosened, the men easily lifted the stone and sidestepped out of the way to set it down.

Painter moved forward with Hank and Rafael.

“Is that gold?” Jordan asked behind them.

If it was, they’d definitely found the right place.

Painter studied the bottom of the stone stopper. Gold coated the lower foot of the mushroom-shaped rock and rimmed the pit’s edges.

“The precious metal must be to keep the plug from corroding into place permanently,” Chin said.

Hank studied the hole. “This reminds me of the opening to a
kiva
. The entrance to the underworld.”

Kowalski glared down that hole. “Look how well that turned out for us last time.”

5:45
A.M.

Hank followed Painter down into the pit. The initial drop was only four feet, but the tunnel below sloped steeply from there, aiming back toward the heart of the geothermal basin and its strange cones. The air was hot but dry, smelling strongly of sulfur.