Sam Reilly had informed her that the Secretary of Defense said that she was found as a baby, inside an ancient temple discovered in the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan. The temple revealed the first existence of the ancient race of Master Builders. Many questions had haunted her since that day. Who were her parents and where were they? She recalled the most disturbing question being the one the Secretary of Defense had asked Sam.
The Master Builders plan everything precisely. If they intentionally left Elise to be found by the elite specialist military team I sent to examine the temple, it begs the question, why? More importantly, if there is a war with Master Builders, what side of it will Elise be on?
With her heart in her mouth, she prayed that the answer to the question wasn’t written inside the temple. She followed the monk up the stairs and inside the main domed section of the Dagoba. It was dark inside and she struggled to follow the monk who appeared to walk with the familiarity of the blind.
She switched on her pen-flashlight and used its dim light to follow the monk into a deeper chamber, where the ancient relics of Buddha were theoretically stored. The path descended more than thirty flights of stairs, before opening into a small domed chamber.
Elise flicked the beam of her flashlight across the dome-shaped ceiling. It was made with a foundation of bricks, the same as the main outer dome. There were no frescoes or murals and not even any references to Buddha.
Her eyes darted toward the monk, who was grinning peacefully. “What is it you expect me to see here?”
“You will need to turn off the light if you want to see it.”
Elise stared at him. Beneath his shaved head he was still smiling. He wore an orange kashaya robe wrapped around under the right arm and back over the left shoulder. There were not a lot of places for him to conceal a weapon, but it was possible. For a moment she had to swallow the fear that rose in her throat like bile. Could she have misjudged him? Was it all a ruse? Had he taken her here to hurt her? It seemed unlikely, but so was the thought that the truth about her past was written on the walls of the dilapidating monument to Buddha.
“Why?” she asked.
“Only you can answer that. I can only take you here. If you want to go further, you will need to open your heart.”
Conflict twisted her face into a grimace of indecision. It was unlike her, but these were unlikely times. Elise took a deep breath in, took a leap of faith, and switched off her flashlight.
The darkness enveloped the room instantly
She glanced above and expelled the breath audibly, certain she’d made the right decision. A series of bricks glowed with purple fluorescence. There were eight in total and when you drew an imaginary line between them, they formed the Greek letter Phi. Her eyes darted to the base, where a large stone depicted a horse in the same purple glow.
Elise recalled Tom and Genevieve’s description of the hypogeum in the Orvieto Underground. They had used a black light wand to reveal the hidden keys of phosphorescent markings, leading to the queen’s sarcophagus.
“I don’t understand,” she said to the monk. “We don’t have a black light, so why do the markings phosphoresce?”
She couldn’t see the monk, but she could hear him laugh. “Markings? I see no markings.”
“You don’t?”
“No. The final chamber is only to be revealed to you.”
“I can see ultraviolet light?”
The monk was still laughing. “How would I know what you can see?”
Elise thought about it. Reindeer relied on ultraviolet light to spot lichens that they could eat. Some scorpions released a purple ultraviolet glow to distinguish between their family and predators. Butterflies are able to see and emit ultraviolet light as a hidden means of communicating with other butterflies. To this effect, many flowers have evolved to display ultraviolet patterns that help butterflies directly land on their nectaries, resulting in pollination of the flower. And now, she too, had been given the gift of vision within the ultraviolet spectrum.
“Now what?” she asked.
“Do you want to find out more, or have you had enough of the truth?”
“I want answers.”
“Good. Then only you can lead the way.”
Elise stared at the ultraviolet markers in the brickwork above. She felt the first brick. It had a little movement. It could be potentially put down to age and dilapidation, but she knew better. She pressed it hard, and the brick appeared to move inward. She repeated the process on the other seven glowing bricks. She then gently put her weight on the glowing horse on the floor.
She grinned.
And the stone on which the horse had been secretly painted now moved down and forward — revealing a set of hidden stairs, leading deeper into the Dagoba.
Chapter Sixty
The Russian built Ka-32A11BC helicopter seemed unnatural to Sam as it whirred its way across the eastern Siberian landscape. With its dual rotor blades that spun in alternative directions, negating the need for a tail rotor to counteract the torque generated by the single blade on a traditional helicopter, the helicopter appeared more like the shape of a strange toy than a functional aircraft. The helicopter had been chartered at the last minute with great expense. In addition to the two pilots, on board were Sam, Tom, Genevieve, Billie and Demyan.
The Gulfstream G650 had been left in Zhigansk Airport, roughly three hundred miles to the west, where it was being refueled. If their mission was a success, the jet would need to be ready to race back to Sigiriya with the final sacred stone. Sam looked at the dark clouds that seemed to encapsulate every end of the world, slowly suffocating the light. He made a silent prayer that there was still time.
He glanced across at Demyan. “You’re sure you dad still has the blueprints for the tunnels?”
“Certain,” Demyan replied, but his grimace appeared less than certain.
“But what?”
“My dad has some cognitive impairment. It might be difficult trying to find them.”
“He has dementia?” Sam asked.
“No. Profound guilt.”
“What?”
“When I was still a kid my mother died. A week later, my father took a new job working for Leo Botkin, to put in place a secret tunnel to an enormous underground cavern. At the time, he thought he was doing the right thing. He was trading his own happiness for the survival of my brother and I. When the project was nearing completion, Botkin betrayed my father by trying to kill him and all his men in order to maintain the secret of the tunnels.”
“How did he escape?”
“My father climbed out through a ventilation shaft. Then, when he came home to find out what became of my brother and I, we were both gone and one of our neighbors told my father that my brother and I drowned in Boot Lake.”
“Under which the colony exists?”
“Exactly.”
“Why did your neighbors think you were dead?” Sam asked.
“My brother did drown in Boot Lake.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too. He was an angry kid and we never really got along, but after my mother died I was determined to be a better brother to him.”
“It must have been hard.”
“You have no idea. When I got home Leo Botkin was there. He told me my father had died in a mining accident and gave me the Russian equivalent of a hundred thousand US dollars at the time, for compensation. I knew the story was all crap and that Botkin was lying to me, but what could I do?”