The Thieves of Faith (32 page)

Stephen laughed, momentarily averting his eyes.

“Maybe not eternal life but a lifespan of one hundred and fifty years. Think of it.”

“Think of the resources required. Man would crowd himself out of existence.”

“I never said
everyone
would live that long.” Julian glared at Stephen.

“You mean only the wealthy.” Stephen’s mood darkened.

“I mean the people who, by their hard work, have the ability to afford a longer life. It would be no different than it is now. The rich have access to the best doctors, the best treatments, while third-world countries suffer under the weight of disease. In Botswana the average life expectancy is thirty-nine years compared to America where it is seventy-two. If you are born in Sierra Leone you can only expect to live for twenty-six years. If you live in Africa and have AIDS you will only survive two years. If you have AIDS, live in America, and have the money, your life expectancy is ten years. All the results of access to medicine. You tell me that is not the way man is living now. It’s called survival of the fittest.”

“No, it’s called survival of the wealthy and you are looking to exploit it. Your avarice knows no bounds.”

“Don’t preach to me about the accumulation of wealth. You are worth over seventy-five million dollars, and what have you done to help the world? Hell, you had a son you never once bothered to contact, or help when he fell on hard times, so don’t you dare preach to me about a moralistic existence. He doesn’t even know you and he’s risking his life to save you. Would you do the same for him? Would you risk your life for a stranger?”

Stephen sat there as the reality of what Zivera was saying sunk in. His anger at the man was only exceeded by his anger with himself, for as much as he wished to deny it, Julian’s words rang true. “And you are going to lead this great leap forward in medicine? This capturing God in a medicine bottle to be dispensed for a price?”

Julian stared at Stephen, his subtle smile answering the question.

“No matter the human cost?”

“Not a single one of mankind’s discoveries came without sacrifice,” Julian said. “Like the sacrifice of war, some lives are lost so many can live. Or to quote an obscure logical thinker, ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.’”

“You mean the needs of the rich outweigh the needs of the poor. For all your spit and polish, you’re nothing more than a barbarian in Prada.”

Julian stared at Stephen, holding his eye. He turned to a servant standing by the door, nodded, and within an instant, two escorts arrived on either side of Stephen.

“They will escort you to your room.” Julian stood, his jaw clinched, his fingers once again pressing on his head to contain his anger.
“Buonanotte.”

As Stephen walked back to his room, Zivera’s words echoed in his mind. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. He was a man who covered his tracks, covered all of the bases. Stephen gleaned much from their conversation but drew only two conclusions: Julian’s mind bordered on insanity…and he had no intention of letting Stephen live.

Julian retired to his library and sat behind his desk with a glass of cognac, sipping it slowly, trying to calm his nerves; his head was throbbing, worse than usual. The medicine no longer helped. It took everything in his being to control the pain, closing his eyes, clearing his mind of anger, of rage.

He wandered down to the wine cellar and selected a Garrafeira port that he had picked up on his last trip to Portugal. It had a way of calming his frayed nerves. He opened it and poured himself a glass, swirling it around in the Tiffany snifter, staring at its golden-brown color and trying to forget his mounting anxieties. And soon they subsided.

It was during a routine body scan that his world was turned upside down. He had always been the picture of health, knowing no illness or disease since he was eight years old, his life almost taken from him by an asthma attack. Since that day, his breathing was never troubled again, he never had a cold or a fever, and never knew pain except for the infrequent tension headache. He underwent the physical, including an all-over body scan, for sheer amusement, to see what the inside of his body looked like, never imagining the horror that existed behind the door that he opened. He wished he could somehow close that door, wished that he could just reach back in time and forgo his whimsical decision.

Julian had seen the PET scans, the interior of his brain; he saw it wrapped about the corpus callosum, with fingerlike tendrils weaving in and out of the brain’s centermost region. An unusual tumor, the likes of which left his doctor more than baffled, but it was a tumor nonetheless.

And the surgery would prove nothing but fatal.

Despite all of his money, despite all of his power…

Julian was dying.

All of the research, all of his efforts had been for naught; his doctors had moved no closer to finding a cure. They gave him no time frame, they gave him no idea of what the debilitating road ahead held except, ultimately, death. His only hope lay with a miracle inside the contents of the box known as the Albero della Vita.

When Dr. Robert Tanner gave him the final diagnosis alone in the library, Julian simply smiled. They both rose and walked down to this very room. Julian selected a Shiraz and toasted the doctor for all of his efforts. Tanner gave his deepest condolences. They did not know how long the unusual growth had been there. It could have been months, it could have been years. Tanner prescribed a regime of chemo and radiation but explained that would only buy him time, it would not cure him. They spoke philosophically on life, of its quality, of the obstacles we face and how no one ever truly knows how much time they have, unaware of which morning they would awaken to their final day.

Julian thanked Dr. Tanner for his efforts and sympathetic words, he toasted life, and then buried him in tomb number 789. It was a place of honor, only three tombs down from his wife and father-in-law.

Julian had yet to feel ill, but his headaches had become more frequent and he didn’t need a doctor to tell him what that meant.

Julian stood there looking upon the crypt constructed so long ago, the dark, haunting cavern that held so much death. And the death seemed to float about, lurking in the shadows, in the far-off corners like a rabid animal waiting for its next victim. The darkness, the shadows seemed to suck away what little light there was in the room. And with it, he felt as if it was pulling at him, sucking his life away, drawing out what little hope he had left.

As Julian looked upon the tombs, upon the victims he had dispatched to achieve his goals, he knew his inevitable fate. He knew his Scripture, he knew there would be no eternal reward for him.

His death sentence would be forever darkness. For no one knew his sins better than he, the trail of death, the gratification he had taken in ending others’ lives.

His only real chance, his only true hope, lay within that golden box that lay somewhere deep beneath the Kremlin.

And his fragile mind reasoned that if he was faced with death, if his chance at survival was stolen from him, then all would feel his fury. If Michael failed, not only would he suffer the death of his father, but the death of his friends and his friends’ families; everyone Michael St. Pierre knew would feel Julian’s final wrath. And Michael would bear witness from this very room, watching as each of them died.

Chapter 34

M
ichael threw the water-resistant kernmantle
rope into the raging waters and watched as the orange ball, tied to the end, was sucked under and vanished from view into the ancient pipe under the wall. Michael fed out the line as it was pulled from his hands by the force of the current. The high-tensile-strength rope was marked in ten-foot increments; he paid strict attention to the distance as it accelerated out of his grip. Fifty feet, sixty, seventy, one hundred feet, the line was almost a blur, the friction heating through his gloves. And then it stopped; two hundred and fifty feet. He looked at Susan and then back at the line protruding from the water as it quivered from the current. He tied the line around a large stone pillar and checked it twice to be sure.

The rocky cavern was aglow with orange lights from the host of fluorescent glow sticks that Michael had cracked and strewn about. The illuminated room was bigger than he’d thought, stretching out for fifty feet. The fifteen-foot ceiling was festered with lime deposits that formed into mini-stalactites, all of which looked like upside-down flames in the artificial orange glow. Michael read his hand-drawn duplicate of the map that he had painstakingly copied and sealed in watertight plastic; he had marked and noted not only the cavern where they now stood but the layout of the Liberia where they were hopefully heading. Michael laid a compass on the map and factored in the distance of the water drain before them. He noted what he hoped was the entrance to the chamber one hundred and twenty feet down the forty-five-degree angled drainpipe.

Michael emptied out the last of the three duffel bags. He picked up, checked, rechecked, and loaded a set of tools—small drill, screwdriver, crowbar, mini oxyacetylene torch—into a dive bag. He put aside four pony bottles, which held the five minutes of air they would need for their return to the real world. He placed the three small cubes of Semtex along with the three timers into the dive bag and hooked it to his waist.

Michael unwrapped and laid out the induction field antenna. It was a flat, four-inch-wide strip that was ten feet long. He formed a circle with it and attached his radio. Normal radio signals are absorbed by rock but low frequencies travel better through solid objects; as such, his induction field would be able to penetrate rock for short distances. Busch and Nikolai would only be several hundred feet away on a straight line; it was a precautionary step but a critical one. In the event of a problem they would need to stay in touch.

Michael hoisted his tank up on his back and tightened his dive vest. He stepped into a climber’s harness and secured it about his waist, its multiple carabiners dangling, two clips attached in the front to a Petzl self-breaking shunt for a controlled descent and an ascender clamp that would help them on their way out. He wore a dive knife on each calf and wore waterproof dive bags on each hip. The black helmet upon his head was equipped with a powerful underwater halogen spotlight, three times stronger than the lamps on a miner’s helmet. He left his fins on shore; he decided they would be more an impediment as he planned to travel feetfirst into the pipe, allowing the suction to provide his locomotion on the way in, and his arms to provide the propulsion up the rope on the way out.

Susan stepped into her climber’s harness and tied it tightly.

“I’m going alone,” Michael said, not bothering to look at her.

“We’ve gone through this.” Susan turned on the valve on her air tank and tested her regulator as she continued to prep for the dive.

“You see that water?” Michael turned toward Susan. “It’s like a drain, tons of water being sucked down a narrow tube. A pressurized pipe: a massive volume trying to squeeze itself through a hole fifty times smaller. This is more than dangerous. You could get killed.”

“So could you, especially if you go alone. You know the first rule of diving: never dive alone. We’ve got one shot at this and if you die”—Susan hoisted her tank onto her back and cinched up the straps—“then so does Stephen.”

Michael glared at her. “I can do this by myself—”

“You may be a good climber,” she cut in, trying to lighten the moment, “but I’m an excellent climber.”

“In case you didn’t know, we are going underwater, not up K2.”

“You don’t know
what
we’ll end up doing. Look, you need me, you don’t realize you need me, but you do.” Susan held up her arm, displaying the watch upon her wrist to Michael. “You see, I’ve got my lucky watch.”

Michael clipped three supply bags to his vest and turned to Susan. He hated when she was right. “This is a bad idea,” he said as he spun her around, checking her gear, pulling on her tank, checking her regulator. He pulled hard at the climber’s harness, causing her to gasp, but she said nothing. He stuck his regulator into his mouth; two pulls of air and he spit it out.

“You watch me, you do what I direct you to,
if
we get into the chamber, you do exactly as I say or I’ll leave you there.
Capisce?
”

She nodded and spit into her mask, swirling around her spittle. She leaned down, rinsed her mask in the water, and put it on.

Michael put a helmet on her head and flipped on the light. He clipped her onto the rope, picked up her regulator, and stuffed it into her mouth. “I lead, you stay five feet back. I know you know how to climb but this isn’t climbing, it will be like carrying one hundred pounds on your back. The force of this water is strong.” Michael hooked his harness onto the line directly in front of Susan, pulling hard, running the breaking sheath up and down the line to test its functionality. He pulled hard on the taut rope, satisfied at the tension and security of its anchor. They both looked at the water, the beams of their headlamps bouncing off the surface, refracting the light around the chamber. And they turned to each other. It was a moment before Michael put his hand on her shoulder. “You OK?”