Bishop lowered the cable into the hole, watching as the spool’s digital readout scrolled toward two hundred feet. He stopped the cable at one hundred ninety and placed the spool on the ground. Using what looked like a miniature staple gun, he fired five titanium staples into the mountainside. Their long barbed tips could support three hundred pounds each. But Bishop didn’t want to risk their lives on what the staples were supposed to do. He fired five more and stepped back. “Good to go.”
King clipped a stop descender onto the line. Its squeeze trigger would allow him to slow his descent by loosening his grip. The counterintuitive function of the device was hard to get used to, but once mastered, it worked without flaw. Of course, that was when rappelling down a cliff face feetfirst. King was descending a vertical stone pipe—head first. He wrapped his feet around the line to keep himself from flipping over and slid into the tunnel. Hidden from the light of day, he reached up and pulled his night vision goggles over his eyes.
The tunnel shot straight down as far as he could see. With wiggle room on either side and a clear shot down, King squeezed his stop descender and plummeted down the hole. The others followed, one by one, spacing out their drops every twenty seconds.
The air grew warmer as King dropped down the pit. And the light ahead grew brighter; so much so that he had to reach up and remove his night vision goggles. Something was down there, he just hoped he wouldn’t find himself dangling above a pit of lava, or a firing squad.
As King approached the bottom of the hole he eased up on his grip and began slowing. The yellow tip of the line’s end was thirty feet below. If he didn’t stop by the time he reached it, he’d fall to the floor below.
Before he expected, King was out of the vent, dangling over a large orb-shaped room. He quickly scanned the space for danger; finding none, he zipped down the line to the stone floor. The others followed him quickly, leaving their descenders clipped to the dangling line. Should anyone find it, their presence would be detected. But they weren’t planning on remaining covert for much longer.
As King approached the room’s only exit and a tall hallway beyond, he saw the light source ahead and paused. A sphere of light, the size of a small plum, floated eight feet above the floor. There was no bulb that he could see and no line dropping down to the light.
Alexander joined him. “This is very bad.”
They entered the room slowly, unable to take their eyes off the light. King motioned to Bishop and Knight. “Take point.” As the pair moved to the far end of the hallway, King stopped beneath the light. He held his bare hand up to it. The heat was searing up close, but dissipated quickly. He shook his head in amazement. This small sphere was lighting and heating several large rooms beneath a mountain.
Queen crouched next to him and picked up a handful of sand from the hallway floor.
“What are you doing?” King whispered as she stood.
“When you got close to it, your hair stood on end,” she replied.
“A static charge?”
Queen answered by throwing the sand to the side of sphere. The sand farthest from the light fell away. The sand closest fell into the light, sucked in by an invisible force. And the sand in between floated as though in orbit around a star. “Not static. Gravity.”
For the small object to have gravity, it would have to be incredibly dense. “They’re miniature suns,” he said.
“Very bad,” Alexander repeated before heading past the sun. “Scientists at the National Ignition Facility are trying to achieve a sunlike fusion reaction using lasers that would supply infinite energy, but this … this goes beyond any science known to me.”
“And I don’t see any lasers,” Queen said.
They all knew the implications. Ridley had unlocked the secrets to not just immortality, animating stone, and imbuing clay with life, or a close approximation of it, but he’d also unlocked the secret to creating light—not in a Thomas Edison sense, but in a real creator of all existence sense. Something beyond their comprehension.
King looked at his high-tech XM-25. Its exploding rounds seemed crude compared to the tiny sun behind them. Could he really stop a man who had made himself a god? He looked at Alexander, who had manipulated history so that the world believed he, the mighty Hercules, was a half-human half-god myth. But now Ridley had, in fact, achieved such a thing.
Alexander met King’s eyes. “He’s still human.”
Realizing they’d been thinking the same thing, King asked, “How do we kill him?”
“We can’t kill him,” Alexander said. “But we can silence him.”
“How?”
“Take off his head. Burn the flesh.”
“Like the Hydra.”
A raised hand from the front of the hall silenced the hushed conversation. Knight pointed through the tunnel exit, then to his ear. They heard somebody. King met them at the end of the tunnel and stopped to listen. The deep baritone voice was impossible to mistake.
They’d found Richard Ridley.
A second voice, identical to the first, replied.
They’d found several Richard Ridleys.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
KING LED THE team toward the voice, moving slowly and silently. He stopped at a tunnel that branched away and turned back to the others. He pointed to Queen, Bishop, and Knight. “See where this goes. Keep your eyes open for Fiona.”
Queen hesitated, but then nodded. She didn’t want to miss taking out Ridley, but King was right. Their best chance of finding Fiona was splitting up. Each member of the team carried an insulin shot. It didn’t matter which one of them found her first. As long as someone found her.
Queen led Bishop and Knight down the side tunnel, their path lit by equally spaced mini-suns.
King and Alexander resumed their approach toward the hallway’s end, toward the voices. The exit was narrow and provided plenty of wall on either side for the two men to hide behind. They stood flat against the brown stone and peeked into the chamber beyond.
The space was vast and separated into two rings. The outer hall wrapped around the room. Its walls were covered in stone murals and blocks of cuneiform. The floor was nearly smooth, constructed from massive stone blocks fit tightly together. Several tall statues, arms raised high, separated the outer hall from an inner chamber. They appeared to be supporting the roof, but King suspected they were decorative.
He eyed the closest statue. Its style was clearly Sumerian—rigid posture, straight limbs, curved joints. All were masculine in build but wore what looked like shin-length skirts. Stiff-looking rolls of hair stretched down just below the shoulder line. King had no doubt that if he could see the face it would have the same oversized, oval, blue lapis lazuli eyes he’d seen beneath the sands of Babylon.
He motioned to Alexander and then to the two nearest statues. Alexander responded by taking a quick peek into the room and then dashing across the twenty-foot distance to one of the statues. He stopped behind it, throwing himself against its backside without making a sound.
King noticed how easy it was for Alexander to move with stealth. How many times had he snuck up on an enemy? How many wars had he taken part in? Better yet, King thought, how many wars has he started?
Alexander peeked around the statue briefly and then waved King in.
King covered the distance to a second statue quickly and stopped behind it. Its legs, hewn out of a solid chunk of marble, easily hid his crouching form. He leaned around the statue’s base and looked into the center of the chamber.