The Last Oracle (46 page)

He held his breath, but nothing happened.

Earlier, after setting the fail-safe, he had fled to the mechanical room and manually disabled the electronic sparking system. He had needed the levels flooded with the accelerant gas, but Mapplethorpe had been right. Painter could not let the men and women captured by the commando team die, not even to protect the girl. So he had set the trap instead, localizing the firestorm to the one room and luring Mapplethorpe and his team to it.

With a majority of the soldiers dispatched and its leader killed, the others would likely disperse and vanish into the night.

Lisa leaned against him. “Will the fires spread?”

The answer came from above. Sprinklers engaged and rained both water and foam over them.

“Is it over?” she asked.

Painter nodded. “Right here it is.”

Still, Painter knew things elsewhere were far from settled.

10:53 A.M.
Pripyat, Ukraine

Gray sprinted toward the closing steel door at the back end of the massive hangar. He pounded down the roadway between the tall rails. He passed the bodies of two dead workers, shot in the head.

His heart thundered in his ears, but he still heard cheers echoing from the distant grandstands, as if this were a track meet and he was sprinting for the finish line in the four-hundred-meter dash. Only in this race, the spectators’ lives depended on him crossing the finish line in time.

With a final burst of speed, he reached the hatchway and dove on his belly under the descending door. It was like entering a crawl space beneath a house. The door was yards thick, composed of plates of steel. He scrabbled forward as the edge continued to drop, pressing down on him. Panic fired his heart. He kicked and paddled, worming his way forward as he was flattened farther under the thick door.

Finally, he reached the end and rolled out into a cavernous space. He took in the sight in a heartbeat: a vast interior, lined by scaffolding, enclosing a ten-story blocky structure of concrete and blackened steel. It was the infamous Sarcophagus, the gravestone over reactor four. By now, the hangar had been hauled almost completely over the crypt. Beyond the Sarcophagus rose a wall of concrete. The hangar would end its crawl and butt up against that wall, sealing the Sarcophagus completely.

But for now, an arch of sunlight spanned the Sarcophagus like a fiery rainbow. It was all that was left open to the world. As Gray stared, the sunlit rainbow grew incrementally narrower.

Off to the left, Gray heard someone speaking in Russian outside the hangar, proud and bold, broadcasted loudly from the grandstands. He also heard the continual steady drone of the hydraulic jacks as they pulled the hangar the last few feet.

Then to the right, a pistol fired.

Gray pictured the bodies outside.

Nicolas was leaving an easy trail of bread crumbs to follow.

As Gray sprinted in that direction, he kept low as he dodged around several stacks of plate steel, a pile of broken concrete, and a forklift. The air smelled of oil and tasted rusty. As he reached the corner of the Sarcophagus, he freed the pistol from his belt.

Peering around the corner, he spotted a figure limping toward the narrowing arch of sunlight. He was about twenty yards from escaping. Gray leveled his pistol.

“Nicolas!” Gray barked at him.

Startled, the man tripped around.

“Don’t move!” Gray shouted.

Nicolas searched for a second, then turned and fled. Gray could not risk killing the man. Not until he found out what was planned. So he took careful aim and shot. Nicolas’s good leg went out from under him. He sprawled onto the floor.

Gray rushed toward him, but a man such as Nicolas did not rise to his height of power by folding under stress. The senator rolled behind a stack of steel I-beams. Shots fired back at Gray, forcing him to duck to the side. He took shelter behind a pallet of lumber.

“
Chyort! Rodilsya cherez jopu!
” Nicolas cursed at him in Russian, his voice edging toward hysteria. He yelled at Gray. “We can’t stay here, you
svoloch
! We have less than three minutes.”

Beyond the man’s hiding place, Gray watched the sliver of sunlight between the massive concrete wall and the trundling hangar pinch ever closer together. There was only four feet of space left. No wonder Nicolas was in a hurry.

“Then tell me how to stop Operation Uranus!” Gray called back.

“There is no way to stop it! It’s all been set in motion. All we can do is get out of the way…
now
!”

“Tell me what you’ve done.”

“Fine! Concussion charges! Planted inside the pillars on the other side of the Sarcophagus. They’ll rip a wall down and expose everyone on that side to a lethal dose of radiation. There’s no way to defuse them. We
MUST
go now!”

Gray attempted to digest what he’d heard, trying to seek a solution. Even if he ran outside and screamed for an evacuation, it would be too late.

“There’s no reason for us to die with them,” Nicolas continued. “The world needs a new direction. Needs strong men. Like myself. Like you. Our group’s goal is to better the state of mankind, to forge a new Renaissance.”

Gray remembered the senator’s earlier discussion about propping up a new prophet onto the world stage. So this is how he planned to do it,
creating world chaos, then offering a solution, one promoted by a figurehead who was guided by the prescience and knowledge of augmented children.

“Even if we die here,” Nicolas pressed, “it won’t be the end. Plans are already in motion that cannot be stopped. Our deaths would serve no purpose. Join us. We can use such men as yourself.”

In truth, Gray could think of no way to stop what was to come.

Beyond Nicolas, the walls continued to close.

“Two minutes!” he called to Gray. “There’s a lead-lined control booth just outside. We can still make it if we leave right now!”

Nicolas shifted behind his hiding place, plainly considering making a run for it. But with a twisted ankle on one side and a wounded leg on the other, he must know that path was certain death.

Then again, so was staying here.

Nicolas finally tossed out his pistol and stepped into the open. He faced Gray, arms out to either side, tottering on his legs. “If this is the only way to live, so be it!”

Gray cursed under his breath. Unable to stop the deaths to come, his only recourse was to apprehend the mass murderer who had orchestrated the deadly operation. Gray stepped out into the open with his pistol leveled.

At that moment, the drone of the hydraulic pumps climbed into a screaming roar. With a groan of twenty thousand tons, the massive arch began to shudder.

What was happening?

Kowalski stepped over the dead soldier to join Elena at the control panel. While Gray had fled on foot, Elena had driven the motorcycle like a NASCAR driver on crack. Kowalski had clung so hard to the sidecar’s handles that his fingers still trembled. They had rocketed to the rear side of the steel archway and sailed up to a concrete bunker that trailed big cables.

It was the control shack for the hydraulic jacks.

A fierce but brief firefight followed.

Kowalski had tried to help, but Elena spun like a ballerina with a machine gun. She danced and pirouetted through a hail of bullets as if anticipating each shot. She took out four soldiers. Kowalski managed to kill only one.

Nicolas’s men,
Elena had said once the gunfight ended.

Once inside, Elena had set to work. Bent over the control board, she pushed the hydraulics toward the redline, seeking to close the hangar faster.

Just outside the shack’s window, one of the towering motors smoked, looking ready to blow. On one of the screens, flashing red warning signs blinked.

That couldn’t be good.

Kowalski stepped out of Elena’s way and stared at a row of monitors. They displayed video feed from inside the hangar. On the middle screen, Kowalski spotted two tiny figures on the floor.

Gray and the Russian guy.

From the angle of the camera, Kowalski could see what Gray could not.

Oh, crap!

“Elena!” he called out. “A little help here!”

He turned in time to see her suddenly slump toward the floor. He reached out and caught her around the waist. His hand found the shirt under her dark jacket soaking and hot. He parted the coat and saw her entire left side drenched in blood. It seemed her dancing had not been as flawless as he’d thought.

“Why didn’t you say something?” he said with an ache in his voice.

She waved to the monitors. “Show me.”

Gray struggled to comprehend the sudden acceleration of the hangar’s closure. The momentum of twenty thousand tons was not easy to get moving quickly, but it was definitely closing faster, accompanied by the scream of hydraulic motors.

“No!” Nicolas cried out.

Gray realized the anguish in his voice was twofold:
fear
that he now
had even less time to escape, and
dismay
that his plans would be ruined if the hangar sealed too soon.

“Let’s go!” Gray said, pointing his pistol at the man.

Nicolas lowered his outstretched arms—and revealed what was hidden behind the pile of I-beams. The man’s hand had been out of view until now.

A second pistol.

It pointed at Gray’s belly and fired.

Gray managed to twist sideways, but the bullet still burned a line of fire across his stomach. He pointed his own weapon and fired. The shot, thrown off by the sudden attack, ricocheted harmlessly off the floor. Even worse, the pistol’s slide popped open.

Out of bullets.

The same could not be said for Nicolas.

The Russian drew a dead bead upon Gray.

As a consequence of his concentration, Nicolas missed the movement along the roof of the arched hangar. A massive yellow trolley crane swept above them and dropped a giant hook.

The whistling as it plummeted finally drew Nicolas’s eye. He glanced up as the massive steel hook, large enough to anchor ships, slammed into the pile of beams next to him. He tried to leap aside, but the impact knocked half the pile over, pinning his legs.

His pistol skittered across the concrete floor.

“Help me!” the man groaned, desperate, panicked.

No time.

Beyond the pile, the narrowing gap between the steel arch and concrete wall was little more than a foot wide. Gray vaulted over the collapsed pile of beams and sprinted for the exit.

As he reached the slit of sunlight, Nicolas screamed at him. “You’ve not won, you
svoloch
! Millions will still die!”

Gray had no time to question him. He shoved into the crack and wormed between the squeezing walls, concrete on one side, steel on the other. The vault was a dozen yards thick. He scooted as fast as he could.
Still the pressure began to squeeze his chest, trying to hold him for the final crush.

He took one last breath and exhaled all his air, collapsing his chest. He shoved the last few feet and fell out of the crack with a great gasp of air, landing on his hands and knees.

Like being born a second time.

Behind him, he missed a figure standing off to the side of the hangar. She slipped into the crack as he vacated it.

Gray turned. “Elena! No! You’ll never make it!”

He rolled to his feet and lunged for her. But she had already slid deep into the crack, deeper than he could follow with his larger form. She moved swiftly, her lithe figure fading farther and farther away.

Gray prayed she’d make it safely to the other side, but it was still certain death. Only then did he note the long smear of blood trailing into the narrowing crack.

A growled voice spoke behind him.

“Where’s Elena?” Kowalski asked.

Gray watched her vanish out of the crack. He shook his head.

Kowalski stared up and down the side of the hangar. “She left me up there. After she dropped that anchor on that bastard. Said she was coming down here to help.”

Gray turned away. “I think that’s where she’s headed.”

Nicolas lay on his back, his legs weighted under a half ton of steel beams. Through a haze of agony, he heard footsteps stumbling toward him. He turned his head. Elena came up to him.

His eyes winced with a pain deeper than any broken bones. “Oh,
milaya moya,
what are you doing here?”

She sank next to him.

Blood soaked through her shirt.

“
Lubov moya
…,” he said with a mix of pain and protectiveness. He lifted an arm, and she fell into his embrace. He held her and rocked her gently as the last of the sunlight squeezed away.

A commanding grind of steel on concrete sounded with a note of finality as the Shelter sealed. A few moments later, a crumbling crash echoed as the far side of the Sarcophagus collapsed. The concussion charges had worked as planned, but the Shelter was already closed tight around it, sparing those outside.

He wasn’t so lucky.

Nicolas stared up at the lighted archway. The inner steel surfaces were all lined by a thick coat of polycarbonate, all the better to reflect radiation and hold it inside.

Not that it mattered, but Nicolas lifted the flap of the dosimeter badge secured to his jacket pocket. The surface had been white when he’d put it on this morning. It was now solid black.

He let it go and reached another arm to cradle Elena better.

“Why?” he asked.

There were many questions buried in that one word.
Why
had Elena betrayed him? Nicolas knew she must have. Nothing else made sense. But also
why
did she come back?

Elena did not answer. He shifted and saw the glaze to her eyes.

Dead.

And so was he.

The
living
dead.

He knew what end awaited him. He had lived his professional life exploring such deaths. It would be as agonizing as it was humiliating.

As he cradled Elena closer to him, something slipped from her hand and landed on his leg. He reached out and grabbed this last gift from her.

His pistol.