Her back warmed suddenly. Heat knocked her face first into the snow. Debris singed the air above. She didn’t move, stayed pressed deep in the snow. Her ears rang with the explosion. Her body felt the depths of the charges roll through the earth, shaking her. Searing hot air roared overhead. Bits of the base’s exterior rained down around her.
She couldn’t hear anything. She got to her feet, checked her body for injuries. No bleeding. Her limbs worked. But she staggered, collapsed. She got to her knees, her feet. She felt her body sway. She stepped in every direction to compensate but her body was unsteady and just kept toppling. She collapsed again. Her balance was fucked.
She lay in the snow, breathing, thinking. What did she do now? Her ears were still ringing from the explosion, only now she could actually hear the ringing. Worse, she could feel the presence of people nearby. And voices. Muffled at first.
She tried to move, went for her knife. But it didn’t happen. She lay there, disoriented and immobile. She cursed herself. She hadn’t gotten far enough away from the detonation in time. She realized just how stupid she was to have ventured in there, even with almost no staff and few sentries.
The voices hummed into focus overhead. ‘Whatever they had here, it’s gone. The meteorite too.’
‘What about her?’
‘Plain-clothed. She’s one of Denton’s,’ he said. ‘We take her with us.’
Chapter 10
She was sharp and exquisite. Everything about her was unapologetic. Despite her chipped ear and missing eye, Denton thought she was perfect. Her name, after all, translated to perfection. And he knew why.
His assistant, Czarina, looked past the glass-encased limestone statue. In her red jacket, she watched a frantic man push past a distracted couple and linger to apologize. The man stepped inside the Spitzer Hall of Human Origins and made a precise line toward them.
‘I see you have excellent taste, sir,’ he said.
The man’s face glistened. He must have run the entire Museum of Natural History to reach them.
‘I haven’t seen her since Germany,’ Denton said. ‘Just as I remember her.’
‘Yes, it’s normally displayed at the Neues Museum in Berlin,’ the man said, gathering his breath. ‘You saw her there?’
Denton shook his head, unable to take his gaze from the statue. ‘No, in a bunker,’ he said. ‘Hitler showed me.’
The man laughed.
‘Her elongated skull is particularly interesting,’ Denton said.
‘Skull deformation was not an uncommon practice,’ the man said, his chin almost disappearing into his neck. ‘Even as recently as the Middle Ages.’
Denton tapped the glass cube. ‘Not exactly. Her followers deformed their skulls, yes,’ he said. ‘Vulgar imitations. Hers was … you can alter the shape—’ he tapped his own shaved head ‘—but you can’t make a skull grow three times its volume.’
The man winced. ‘Well now, I’ve never seen a large skull in person.’
Denton frowned. ‘Yes, they’re usually classified. I often forget.’ He moved for his ID. ‘I’m a specialist with the CDC. Infectious diseases.’
He imagined the sweat on the man’s face turn cold as he stumbled a response.
‘Is there … something wrong?’ he said, failing to register the badge.
Sometimes Denton wondered why he even bothered arranging accurate IDs. ‘Follow me,’ he said.
He strode off through the hall into the circular chamber at the end of the museum, passing a pair of security guards. He stepped into the Ross Hall of Meteorites without a word. The man followed, waiting for an explanation.
Glass cabinets of meteors spiraled upward into the center, where a truck-sized meteor was perched under an array of lights. Denton wasn’t interested in the truck-sized meteor. He checked the appearance of each specimen as he strode past. The man pumped his arms to catch up while Czarina paced herself behind them in jeans and black sneakers.
‘One of your samples was recently reclassified,’ Denton said. ‘CM1 class. Extremely rare.’
The man finally caught up and pointed to a glass case at the top of the spiral.
‘Yes, I know the one,’ the man said.
Denton couldn’t be bothered walking around the spiral so he leaped over the handrail to reach it. Behind him, the man hesitated to consider the same maneuver, but apparently thought better of it and took a more proper walk around the spiral.
The meteorite looked similar to the rock he’d encountered in the Bavarian castle during World War II. It glistened like honeycomb covered in molten silver. During the war, the Nazis had recovered a total of seven meteorite samples, CM1 class — Carbonaceous Chondrite Type 1—from Siberia, Tibet and Antarctica. They had been found during expeditions that would fuel conspiracy theories of Nazi secret bases for decades to come. Since the war, the Fifth Column had classified 38,660 meteorites.
Only sixteen of those were CM1 class meteorites.
The most recent meteorite discoveries were in northern Africa and Nevada. The fragile matter he was looking for in these almost unattainable meteorites could survive entry into the Earth’s atmosphere but once it crashed and fragmented, it was vulnerable. Exposed to the desert heat, the virus would perish in two to eight hours. The Nevada meteorite was not observed at the time it landed and had been buried in the desert for some time, so Denton didn’t bother to dispatch a team for it. This meant it became the first CM1 class meteorite to become available to the public.
The other fifteen CM1s, however, had landed in the Antarctic, where the cold temperatures had hardened the outer coating of the virus into a rubbery gel that protected it from deterioration. Unfortunately, the fifteen meteorites did not contain a virus. But this newly reclassified meteorite was a new addition. While other classes of meteorite might have brought plague and disease, either sprinkled from above or after impact, Denton knew the CM1 class carried greater promise.
Since the castle in Bavaria, instrumentation advances had come a long way. Denton had had teams of cosmochemists on standby to analyze the meteorites for many years.
In the seventy years he’d spent hunting the CM1 class meteors as they fell, he had only ever seen known of one other Phoenix virus in the hands of the Fifth Column.
The sample was kept in right there in New York, in an old OSS/Fifth Column base beneath Grand Central terminal. The same base he once worked from, the same base his father once worked from, and the same base his son once worked from. His son had mislabeled it on purpose. No one knew it was there except him.
Denton recalled the Czech prisoner, Yiri, who he’d plucked from the SAS assault. He’d made sure Yiri survived the war. Yiri had stayed briefly at the OSS base in Grand Central, where some testing had taken place — albeit fruitless, since the Fifth Column’s science, although decades ahead of anything mainstream, had still been crude by today’s standards. Yiri returned to Prague and started a family. Denton had kept tabs on Yiri’s descendants while he waited for each meteorite to fall.
Just that week, a rare CM1 meteorite had landed in Peru. Denton’s team scooped it up immediately and ran the tests. The heavens had looked fondly upon him because it matched the precise Phoenix virus he’d lost at the castle, the same Phoenix virus he’d lost with Sophia’s defection. And it was, at that very moment, on its way to New York.
Denton checked his watch. Within the hour, he might well have all three viruses. By the time the Fifth Column realized what he’d accomplished they would be too late to do anything about it.