The Minoan Cipher (A Matinicus “Matt” Hawkins Adventure Book 2) (49 page)

Salazar watched Calvin approach, hands held high.

“Your friend shows good judgment,” he said. “You wouldn’t have made it very far. The castle’s defenses are automated. The pilot has to activate a signal to disable the drone. We have unfinished business to take care of, Leonidas. You disobeyed my orders.”

“You fired Leonidas, Mr. Salazar. My name is Chad.”

“I don’t care what you call yourself now. You never pushed the button on the remote.”

“You mean
this
remote?”

He unwrapped his fingers from around the ear-piece, which he had palmed before raising his hands. He had given the button two punches. He pressed the button one more time. He wasn’t sure what it would accomplish, but he hoped it would distract Salazar long enough for him to make a grab for his gun before Bruno and the goons arrived.

The priestess sanctuary had up-to-date ventilation and temperature control systems to prevent the mummies from further deterioration and the gas was quickly sucked out of the chamber. The security guards who’d been searching the Maze for Kalliste had heard the commotion in the sanctuary and came running back to the chamber. They saw the dead bodies of the Prior and gathered protectively around Lily, who stood in front of the altar, staring up at the mummy of the High Priestess.

The drugs had worn off and she saw the priestess not as a beautiful hallucination, but as she was, a horror of dehydrated flesh. But she still heard the voices calling from the dark caves of Sumer that had spawned the perverted religion and the secret society that came to call itself the Way of the Axe.

The voices in her head chanted over and over again.

She must die. She must die.

“Potnia.”

She turned at the new chorus of voices that had called her name. The priestesses had returned to the sanctuary. Their gowns were soiled and their make-up smeared all over their faces, but their eyes still burned with fanaticism.

She smiled. “Welcome back, sisters.”

She must die.

Lily understood why she had brought down the displeasure of the Mother Goddess. The offering had been insufficient. She wanted more blood than Kalliste could provide.

Lily would purge Auroch of those who opposed her, reward the ones who came to her side and launch a campaign like none before to slake the goddess’ thirst. The Inquisition would be child’s play by comparison.

She picked up the bull’s head rhyton and held it to her breast.

She must die.

A second later Chad triggered the remote. The explosion vaporized Lily and pieces of the bull’s head ripped into the priestesses and the security guards clustered closely around her.

The shock wave knocked over the flaming braziers setting the altar boughs on fire, swept aside the pillars holding the double-edged axes and slammed into the colonnade. A shower of red-hot clay fragments rained down on the rows of mummies. Within seconds, the Old Ones had burst into flames.

CHAPTER EIGHTY

Those in the courtyard heard the explosion as a muffled
whump
coming from below the Tripartite Shrine. The ground shook. A couple of sacral horn decorations fell off the roof. A metal support holding the camouflage canopy buckled. The covering over the shrine listed at an odd angle.

Salazar realized what had happened. He raised his rifle to shoot Chad, but stopped with his finger on the trigger. From the corner of his eye he had seen two gray blurs racing toward him across the courtyard. He reached instinctively for the double-axe medallion that normally hung around his neck, and realized he had given it to Chad to wear. He swiveled and let off a burst of gunfire. The fusillade missed the speeding Daemons by yards.

Salazar threw his weapon at the creatures in a failed attempt to divert them and began to run for the helicopter. He had only gone a dozen feet when the first Daemon bowled him over like a ten-pin and brought its massive jaws down on his throat. The second monster dove in, fighting to be in on the feast.

The monsters were half-mad from the stinging gas when they saw the group standing near the shrine. They had been trained to focus on those not wearing a medallion, carrying a weapon or on the run, and Salazar qualified as a target.

Hawkins looked away from the disgusting sight and loped for the helicopter with Calvin by his side. Chad, who had retrieved his weapon, again took up the rear. They made it to the helicopter. Calvin got in and leaned out to pull Kalliste through the door.

“Climb in and we’ll be on our way,” he said.

“We can’t go yet.” Hawkins told Calvin what Salazar had said about the automatic launch of the drone.

“No problem,” Calvin said. “I brought some bug spray.”

He slipped the gear bag off his shoulder and extracted the Spike missile and its launcher which he aimed at the metal insect sitting on its staging. There was a whoosh as the missile flew from the launcher and the drone exploded in a ball of yellow and red flames. He threw the launcher away and climbed into the helicopter.

Startled by the explosion, the Demons turned away from their feast and ran back into the shrine.

“I thought that was gator repellent,” Hawkins said.

“Pest’s a pest.”

His hands went to the controls. Within seconds, they were airborne. Calvin flew the chopper straight up, and when he had gained a few hundred feet of altitude, he hovered over the canopy.

Another support had buckled, and the camouflage cover had split apart, producing an odd optical illusion. Where only the courtyard had been visible before, there were now glimpses of the shrine’s towers. Smoke bellowed from the entrance.

“That slimy bastard,” Chad fumed. “The damned thing was a bomb.”

“What are you talking about?” Hawkins said.

“It was a jug shaped like the head of a bull. Salazar called it a rhyton but it was full of explosives. He ordered me to carry it into the sanctuary. Gave me a remote that I was supposed to press when the ceremony began. He said it would send a signal to break up the ceremony, but what he really wanted was to blow me and everybody else up.”

Hawkins went to reply, but he stopped to stare at the Tripartite Shrine. The towers had collapsed and were disappearing into the earth. He remembered the foundation cracks he had seen throughout the Maze. The columns supporting the roof must have crumbled from the force of the explosion. The weight of the shrine was too much for the ceiling to bear. The remnants of the shrine would plunge to the deepest depths of the Labyrinth.

“Like I told Salazar,” he said, “I’ve seen all I want to see. Let’s go home.”

Calvin nodded and put the helicopter on a course away from the castle.

Abby was sitting in the cockpit waiting for Matt to call in on the radio when she saw the helicopter approaching. She had disobeyed his orders to leave if he and Calvin didn’t call in. The deadline was an hour past, and the radio had been silent. Something had happened. That could only mean one thing. Matt was dead.

Tears welled in her eyes. It was probably too late to escape the oncoming aircraft, but she didn’t care. She grabbed a spare CAR-15, stepped out of the cockpit and aimed, thinking that it was funny that the aircraft running lights were on and that it was turning side-to, offering an easy target.

Screw it
, she thought. She was about to set her sights on the Auroch bull horns logo on the fuselage of the chopper, now only a couple of hundred feet away, when an arm waved at her from the helicopter window. A familiar voice came over the radio.

“Hoo-yah, Abby.”

She lowered the weapon, and with the widest smile possible on her face, waved back at Hawkins.

CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

Molly was ecstatic when Hawkins called and said all were safe after rescuing Kalliste.

He told her how he and Calvin had infiltrated the castle maze through the water system, and with the help of someone named Chad, had stopped a bunch of crazy cultists from murdering Kalliste. A deep frown came to her chubby face at the news Salazar was dead.

“How’d he die?” she asked.

“Um. A couple of monster dogs tore him to pieces.”

“Serious?”

“Serious.”

“Hah,” she said. “It would have gone a lot worse if I got a hold of him.”

Hawkins chuckled. “I’m sure that’s true, Molly.”

“Dang. Guess it’s over,” she said.

“I wish I could be sure. Members of the Way of the Axe are scattered around the world. Salazar and Lily are dead. But as long as Auroch Industries is in business, the possibility remains that they could rekindle this whole sick thing. Salazar talked about power on a global scale. He said he was not looking to the past, but toward the future.”

“Is that what he said?
Future
?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe I can do something about that,” Molly said.

She hung up before Hawkins could say another word. She wanted to pull her thoughts together. She went down the list in her head.

Salazar learns about the fusion process and becomes a generous supporter of the new energy source, even though it would put Auroch out of business. He puts money into an organization called FUTR. He sends an explosives expert to Cambridge where a formal announcement will be made of the new process at MIT, along with a demonstration of how it works.

An explosion kills the scientists who have developed fusion and casts doubt in the eye of the unsophisticated public over the future of science that created it. It was the way Auroch had always dealt with rivals.

Molly looked at her digital watch. The start of the energy forum was minutes away.

She called up a map of the MIT campus onto her computer screen. Big place. She had to narrow it down.

She got into the files she had downloaded from the phone retrieved from the attacker she was calling the “bird man.” He had visited the campus several times, but kept coming back to the same point.

Kresge Auditorium.

She looked at a photo of the Saarinen-designed auditorium. Its distinctive rounded roof was an eighth of a sphere, made of reinforced thin shell concrete, with sheer glass curtain walls. The demonstration would be held in the concert hall of Kresge. A bomb blast would have devastating impact, testing the spirit of ‘Boston Strong,’ the motto that described the city’s resilience after the Marathon terrorist attack.

She thought about what Hawkins had told her, that Salazar got someone to smuggle a bomb into the Maze. Guys like Salazar don’t change their spots. He would do the same thing in this case. The bomb could be any innocent-looking object.

The speeches would come first, then the demonstration. The speakers stood at a podium. Good place to stash a bomb.

She went back over the credit card records of the bird man and saw the charge for the rental truck and another for a sign painter. Using an untraceable phone, she called the sign painting company, said she had seen the job they had done. Using the bird man’s name, Sutherland said that she wanted something similar for her food truck.

“Cain’t remember the exact wording.”

They checked their records, and said, “Acme Office Supply.”

Not very imaginative. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ll be calling you.”

The bomb would have to be triggered at the precise moment during the demonstration. With the bird man dead, that wouldn’t happen. Something nagged at her. She went back to the credit card and saw that the bird man charged two dinners and lunches on several occasions. He had an accomplice.

They had kept the truck under rental. She guessed that the accomplice could sit in the truck watching the broadcast on his tablet; at the correct time, he’d make a telephone call that would trigger the bomb. She hoped the speakers would be long-winded. In the meantime she tapped away at her keyboard. Her fingers were a blur. Sweat poured down her forehead and into her eyes.

She kept an ear open to the TV volume and heard that the professor had ended his speech.

She glanced at the TV screen. The speaker had stepped away from the podium.

He smiled broadly, and said, “Now I will turn this over to my colleagues to demonstrate a discovery that will revolutionize the delivery of non-polluting cheap energy to the farthest reaches of the globe.”

She punched the keyboard one more time. The television screen flickered and went dark. She had hacked the Cambridge power grid and stopped the demonstration in its tracks. She knew she had only bought some time. She had to get the auditorium evacuated and the bomb disabled. She looked up a number and called it.

A man answered. “Bomb squad.”

“You’d better clear out Kresge Auditorium in a big hurry and get your bomb-sniffing dogs to the podium before the lights come back on.”

“Are you saying there’s a bomb at MIT?”

“Yup. Bomber’s going to trigger an explosion from an Acme Office Supply Truck. Keep an eye out for him.”