“I told you!” Lyoncheka turned toward Yakov. “I told you not to… ” He never finished the sentence, as Katyenka fired a single round. It hit the side of Lyoncheka’s head, a small black hole on entry, and ripped out the other side, taking a large portion of brain, blood, and skull with it.
Turcotte had not moved throughout, and he remained still as Lyoncheka’s body slumped to the floor.
“Katyenka.” The resignation and disgust in Yakov’s voice expressed how he felt. “Why?”
Katyenka had the gun trained on the Russian, but Turcotte knew she would stitch him full of holes before he made half the distance to her.
Katyenka shook her head. “I do not need you, comrade, so do not irritate me.” Turcotte noticed movement. He forced himself not to look directly. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Pasha, lying in a pool of expanding blood, slowly moving a hand down her side.
“I thought you trusted her,” Turcotte said loudly. “You Russian pig!”
“Shut up, both of you.” Katyenka shifted the muzzle between the two. “You are children groping in the dark.”
Yakov turned and grabbed Turcotte’s coat by the lapels. “Don’t talk to me like that, you American slime.”
Turcotte could see that Pasha had pulled something small and black out. A thumb flipped open a red cover, revealing a switch. At that moment, Turcotte knew what she was going to do and he almost alerted Katyenka, but his discipline prevailed.
With her dying effort, Pasha pushed down on the remote switch. The charges that lined the elevator shaft they had just departed went off in rapid succession. Farther down the corridor, a secondary explosion fired less than a second after the first, destroying the tunnel and trapping them.
Katyenka howled in rage and spun about, firing at Pasha on automatic. The bullets slammed into the already dead body, pushing it down the corridor. Yakov took advantage of that lapse to attack her by the expedient method of tossing Turcotte at her.
Turcotte was prepared for that, twisting in the air and grabbing at the gun as he hit her. He bit back a curse as his right hand closed on the hot, stubby barrel of the AKSU, flesh searing, just as it had in Germany months before.
He ripped the gun out of her hands as Yakov grabbed her arms, pinning her against the wall of the tunnel. The last of the charges went off and the elevator doors buckled as rock and stone filled the shaft. Dust billowed out from both ends of the tunnel, further decreasing visibility.
“Who are you?” Yakov yelled at the woman struggling in his arms.
Turcotte trained the weapon on her, even as she kicked at the large Russian holding her captive. Yakov solved that by snapping one of her arms like a twig. Katyenka hissed in pain.
“Do it again and I break the other,” Yakov warned. “Who are you? Who do you work for?”
Katyenka spit at him. Her body spasmed, then her eyes rolled back. She went limp.
Yakov held her with one hand while he checked the pulse in her neck with the other. “Ahh!” He laid her on the floor. “She’s dead.”
“How did she do that?” Turcotte asked.
Yakov was staring down at her sadly. “I trusted her. Almost.”
Turcotte knelt next to the body. He pulled up her eyelid and felt… a contact. He pulled it off. Below was a red iris in a red pupil. “The Ones Who Wait.”
Yakov nodded. “They wanted whatever is in the Archives. Lyoncheka must have fooled them all these years, and we led her straight to him.” Yakov went over to Pasha’s body. He grabbed the satchel off her shoulder. He pulled out a pistol, which he stuck in his belt, and several grenades, both fragmentation and flash-bang, dividing them between himself and Turcotte. Then he covered her face with her jacket.
Turcotte stood and checked his watch. The clock was still running. In a perverse way he was bolstered by the attempt by Katyenka to betray them. It meant there was a very good chance they were on the right path. After all the delays once they had reached Russia, this one was the most positive.
“Let’s go.” Turcotte strode off down the corridor. Yakov followed, leaving the bodies lying on the floor.
Colonel Tolya waited as his men pried open the elevator doors. As soon as they were far enough apart, he leaned in, shining a powerful light down. Through the cloud of dust he could see the shaft blocked by rubble. He pulled back and signaled for his men to let the door shut.
Tolya was a colonel in the GRU, the intelligence arm of the Russian army. He took his orders… and the money for him to follow them… from Katyenka, and she had been most specific about how far behind he was to follow and what he was to do.
This destruction of the elevator had not been in the instructions, but he did have a backup plan.
He had a metal case slung over his shoulder that he swung around to his chest. He thumbed the combination to the right setting and opened the lid. He pressed the on button and an active matrix display came alive. The screen was split, and a dot glowed on both sides. The left showed horizontal displacement, while the right vertical. The object that the tracker was ranging in on was a highly radioactive isotope.
“Who has the plans?” Tolya yelled.
“I do, sir.” A young engineer lieutenant hesitatingly came forward, looking out of place among the heavily armed GRU commandos clustered around Tolya.
The engineer unrolled a set of yellowing paper on Pasha’s desk. “These are very old, sir. I do not know if they have been updated. The underground tunnels and chambers below the city have been the province of numerous organizations, some of which did not want others to know what they were doing.”
Tolya simply stared at the lieutenant, then used a pencil to point at the plans. “North of us about three hundred meters. Down about eight hundred meters.”
The engineer bit his lip as he made the mental adjustments while looking at the charts. “This shaft is listed. It intersects a deeper cross-tunnel, here. That leads to this intersection, which runs to the point you want.”
“Can we get down there?” Tolya asked.
“It will take a while. We have to go to this downshaft below the Armory in the Kremlin,” the lieutenant said. “And then…” The lieutenant paused when he realized no one was listening. Tolya was already moving.
Duncan was once more watching the desert flit by below, this time through the skin of the bouncer. “Before we go to Egypt, there is one last thing I must do,” she informed Mualama. “There is a man I must talk to. His name is Werner von Seeckt.”
Mualama nodded. “Von Seeckt was with the German party in 1942 that recovered the Airlia atomic weapon from inside the Great Pyramid.”
Duncan was startled. That information had been close-held. “How did you know that?”
“I have been many places over the years in my travels,” Mualama said. “The Giza Plateau I have visited many times. I believe Sir Burton knew something of the black box von Seeckt recovered.”
Duncan could see the Nellis Air Force Base hospital coming up quickly as the pilot directed them to the helipad. “Why didn’t he let people know?”
“He made a promise. Everything I have discovered, I have done so by tracking his movements and unraveling the riddles he left to get around his promise. The manuscript should yield more information.”
Duncan shook her head. “The English and their sense of honor.”
“Honor is a good thing,” Mualama said. “It might be the most important thing in the path leading to truth.”
The sun shone down on Easter Island, revealing a ghastly scene. Several of the clusters of subjects the guardian had gotten from the Washington were dead. On orders from the guardian, the mech/biomanipulator checked that by sticking a needle into the bodies. There was no response. But other clusters of subjects were more promising, the bodies obviously still alive, given the cries for help and the struggling against their bonds.