The Seventh Stone (42 page)

“
The sun,” Braydon shouted. “We’re turning the sun!”

She clamped her arm and leg tighter around him and pressed. With a deafening explosion, it all went black.

CHAPTER
48

A massive fist slammed into Christa’s back. It knocked the air from her lungs. She clamped her hands over her ears. Something wet and sticky oozed from them. Blood? That wasn’t the main problem. Her brain spun wildly. She sucked in air. Big mistake. It was thick with dust and concrete powder. The coughing fit hit her like a boxer rapid punches a speed bag. Braydon clamped her shoulders, his eyes searching hers. His face and hair were powdered gray with the fine dust. Amazingly, both of them hadn’t been thrown from their precarious, and still rising, table top. He shouted something at her. Looked like a question. Are you okay? She couldn’t hear it over the high-pitched ringing.

Through the ringing, muffled shouts, from below. Flashlight beams sliced through the rising dust clouds, strafing the seven sided perimeter. Rambitskov. He must have blown open the door into the chamber below them. It wouldn’t take him long to figure out that the two people he was chasing were high above them, on the round platform of a table that was still lifting upwards like a stage elevator.

Braydon shook her, pointed up. He stood, grabbed the rim of the sun’s ray, strained to turn it like a giant screw. No, not a screw. A lid. Their table breached the bottom edge of circular cupola. Knees knocked and legs knotted together as they squeezed into a crouch. The ceiling and certain death would crush them in less than a minute. Crushed by heaven. Ironic. While wrapped around a man. Didn’t even want to go there. She pressed tighter against Braydon, grabbed his belt to keep his foot from slipping off the table top to be trapped and squeezed flat between it and the cupola wall. The ringing in her ears faded. The gunshots got louder. Bullets slammed into the bottom of the table top. High caliber. Each strike shot a jolt up against the soles of her boots. The map of the world beneath her feet was either going to kill them, or save them.

She pressed her fingertips against the curving ray of sun. A shift of weight. The entire sun twisted beneath her fingers. Braydon grabbed her to save her balance. They pushed again. Something clicked into place.

“
Tommy always said a virtuous man could move heaven and earth!” Braydon yelled. He bent over her. She ducked lower. He pressed his back onto the sun and pushed up, struggling to straighten his legs. She reached up on either side or him, flattened her palms against the ceiling, her cheek against his. Together, they pushed upwards. It lifted!

Braydon shifted around, grabbed the circular lid by its rim, heaved it up and pushed it aside. Daylight above! Gloom had never held such promise. Horns honked. Exhaust fumes fingered through the cement powder hanging in the air. The table beneath them continued to rise. Braydon pulled her to standing. She shoved the disc of ceiling away from their small opening. From the top, it looked like an ordinary manhole cover. She scrambled onto the sidewalk. He hoisted himself out behind her. The table top filled the hole, becoming flush with the sidewalk, the blue lapus lazuli and green malachite of the world map scuffed with footprints and dusted in gray.

She nudged Braydon and pointed to Saint Patrick’s, across Fifth Avenue. They had traveled an entire crosstown block in the underground tunnel system. Two black SUVs hunkered like guard dogs in front of the cathedral, parked in haste and self-importance, their front tires pawing the sidewalk. A uniformed police officer, hand poised on the butt of his gun, approached the vehicles with slow caution, until his peripheral vision alerted him. He crouched lower, craning his neck to see them through the clutter of yellow cabs speeding down Fifth Avenue in a survival of the fittest race to make the light.

Two grandmotherly tourists stopped just a few feet away to gape at them, these strange, gray creatures creeping up from the underworld. The lady in the red wool coat snapped Braydon’s photo with a disposable 35mm camera. “Isn’t this exciting, Martha,” said the one in the cableknit hat. “They’re filming a movie right here. Only in New York,” she laughed.

Behind her on the corner, a man wearing a blue windbreaker emblazoned with the yellow, block letters, FBI, had spotted them, too. He was breathing hard, his chest heaving from exertion. One of Rambitskov’s men? Who could tell the players anymore? Except for Braydon’s gray patina, the guy looked like him. Crew cut brown hair, six-two, all bones and muscle, chiseled movie-star face. He even had Braydon’s characteristic slump, as if he didn’t want to intimidate anyone unnecessarily. She jammed the silver box containing Urim and Thummim into her daypack. Didn’t matter what side this new player believed in, she could run pretty fast, and deal with this on her own, before surrendering the stones to anyone.

Thunder rumbled. The old ladies pouted at the dark sky. “Thunder in December,” the one in the cableknit hat remarked. “I never heard of such a thing.” They hadn’t heard nothing yet.

The FBI man started towards them. The beat cop across the street, with the suspicious way he approached those SUVs, he couldn’t possibly be on Rambitskov’s payroll. She waved her arms at him. The FBI guy wouldn’t dare shoot with a cop watching.

The cop was watching, all right, and drawing his gun and aiming it straight at her. “Demon!” he yelled. “From the underworld! I’ll send you back to hell!” He crouched into a shooting stance. Braydon grabbed her, swung her around and flung her behind a large granite pedestal. She fell hard, scraping her palms and knees, then rolled onto her back. The massive bronze sculpture of muscle-bound Atlas towered above her, on top of the granite pedestal. The Art Deco Atlas bent under the weight of the intersecting rings of the cosmos balanced on his shoulders.
My God, an armillary sphere
.

Braydon dove for the old ladies, positioning his body between them and the cop. More shots blasted from Saint Patrick’s. The FBI agent on the corner rushed toward them, yanked his gun from a shoulder holster as he ran, and targeted the cop. She glanced around the edge of the pedestal. The cop dove for cover behind the parked SUV. The FBI man shot twice, both rounds punching holes into the SUV next to the one the cop hid behind, most likely, just where he was aiming. The ladies rounded the corner towards Rockefeller Plaza with surprising, if awkward, speed. The FBI man and Braydon raced to Christa’s side, diving for the cover of the pedestal. They pressed their backs against the granite, bracing either side of her, handguns up and ready.

“
Hello, Fox,” the man said.

Braydon acknowledged him with a nod. “Neidemeyer.”

Neidemeyer was breathing faster and harder than she was. “Rambitskov’s got the entire New York field office looking for you,” he said. “Ordered to pick you up for questioning in an attempted murder at The Plaza.”

“
Attempted?”

“
Jared Sadler is alive, barely.”

“
Talking?”

“
Coma,” Neidemeyer said. “You feel like turning yourself in, making my life easy?”

“
Can’t accommodate,” said Braydon. “Got to save the world.”

“
Again?” A bullet thudded into Atlas’s massive metal foot of the statue, right above her head. It sliced a shiny, bronze gash through the patina. “I would tell you what Fox did,” he said to her, “but then I’d have to shoot you, and it seems like you got enough trouble right now.”

“
I need her,” said Braydon. “Without her, I don’t stand a chance.” Christa wasn’t sure what to think of that.

“
Now I know you’re in trouble,” Neidemeyer said, “Miss?”

“
Devlin,” she said. That silver box in her pack dug into her spine. “Christa Devlin.” They shook hands. His grip was firm; the gesture felt wildly out of place.

Neidemeyer popped up to check the status of the crazed cop, then ducked back down. “Rambitskov authorized deadly force to stop you, Fox. Maybe he’s caught that bug that’s turning people into raving lunatics,” he said. “Maybe you have. That guy in the Plaza was under your protection. He was pinned to the floor by a sword. Evidence at the crime scene implicates you.”

A gunshot. The bullet zinged off the granite to Christa’s right. “It’s a poison,” she said, “in the water supply here and in the Princeton suburbs. Not everybody will be affected, but most will. It makes people violent, then kills them, if they haven’t already been murdered. Seven days after ingestion, the victim is dead.”

Neidemeyer frowned. “I’d say you were the one who is crazy,” he said, “but across the street one of NYPD’s finest is shooting at you because you’re demons.”

“
You’ve got to get the word out, Neidemeyer, without inciting panic,” said Braydon. “Blame it on a microbe that causes severe stomachaches or something, but warn people not to drink the water. And don’t go through Rambitskov. He’s with the dark side on this one.”

Neidemeyer pursed his lips and narrowed his eyes. “Rambitskov is a nasty piece of work, no doubt about that. The minute I heard he had you trapped in Saint Patrick’s, I double-timed it down here. But the man’s got red, white and blue running in his veins. He’d never betray his country, kill Americans.”

“
His plan is to save them,” said Braydon. “He wanted to send the G-20 a message, that they better listen because we have a bio-weapon ready to be deployed for which we have the only defense. Problem is, Rambitskov doesn’t know his mastermind of a boss doesn’t have the antidote yet.”

“
Got any proof?”

“
No time for proof,” said Braydon. “Like when we jumped on those neo-Nazis with the dirty bomb in the diamond district. If we waited for proof then, New York City would be a radioactive wasteland. I’ve got to track down the antidote to the poison and I’ve got to get it before the bad guys. It’s complicated and sounds crazy, but our best shot is to follow the leads to the antidote. As far as we know, it’s the only way to save those people.”

Neidemeyer’s gaze reached down the street to Christa’s left. A young couple were going at it, screaming, gesticulating. Their little girl, in a frilly pink dress, cried, kicking and jerking against the safety straps of her stroller. Christa tensed, ready to race over there, scoop up the little girl. At any moment, the crazed policeman could target the child.

The phantoms appeared, as real as the thunder and lightning. Six of them swooped and howled in the wind that whipped down the sidewalks.

Neidemeyer’s expression was grim. “We all know something big is happening,” he said. “Law enforcement is responding to so many assaults and fights it’s like spitting on a wildfire. Even Tough-as-nails Thompson is scared. I’ve never seen him scared. He called his wife, told her to pack up the kids and head west.”

The hairs rose up on the back of her neck. A sudden crash and blinding light ripped through the air. A lightning bolt exploded the top spire of the cathedral.

Static electricity sizzled across Atlas’s metal spheres dancing across them in a blinding, blue light. The three of them pressed closer together. The glow fizzled out.

“
Okay, something’s crazy,” said Neidemeyer, “and it’s not us.”

She pointed at the sphere. Her finger trembled. “The planets,” she said, “they’re aligned.”

Neidemeyer looked at her, narrowed his eyes. “Then again.”

“
I must have walked by this sculpture a hundred times, but never really noticed. It’s an armillary sphere,” Braydon said, “like that artifact you found in Arizona.”

“
A clue to the location of the Turquoise, one of the seven stones.” She grabbed his hand. “The spheres are designed to be manipulated. Align the planets. I should have thought of that before. We’ve got to get to Percival’s house, solve the puzzle of the sphere and be on tonight’s flight to Phoenix.”

He gripped her fingers tightly to hold her down. “Agreed, but let’s get there alive.” He spun around, quickly stood up, took a shot at the cop. Thwacks zinged the other side of the pedestal as the cop fired back, three times. Braydon crouched back down. “Who is this guy, NYPD’s sharpshooter of the year?”

Neidemeyer slipped his wallet out of his back pocket, opened it, and removed all the money he had, pressing it into Braydon’s hand. Looked like a couple hundred dollars. He topped the cash with his Mastercard. He hesitated, then unclipped his badge from his wallet. “I would never do this,” he said, “for anyone, except you, Fox.” He handed Braydon the badge. “You’ll need it. Rambitskov put your name on the no-fly list.”

“
Work it on your end,” said Braydon. “There’s a retired Colonel, Donohue, has a connection in CDC testing the water. Slim chance, but maybe the only one, if we don’t make it back.”

Neidemeyer sucked in a deep breath. “Listen, Fox, they’re keeping the press in the dark, but kids are dying,” he said. “Two in the last hour. Dozens more are already in comas. Old folks, too. You got to make it back.” He checked the ammunition in his handgun. “You figure our boy in blue across the street got the standard issue Smith and Wesson 5946?”

“
Sounds like,” said Braydon. Two more bullets zinged off Atlas’s calves, clawing out bronze gashes. “That’s it. By my count, he’s empty.”

“
I got this one,” said Neidemeyer. “You two get out of here before Rambitskov rises from the underworld behind you.”

Neidemeyer leaped up and rushed out from behind the pedestal. Christa stole a look around the edge. Braydon, to her left, trained his gun on the crazed cop, but the cop was just standing there, in the open, staring up at the spires of Saint Patrick’s, where the lightning had struck. Neidemeyer dodged through the line of yellow cabs, their horns blaring and brakes squealing. The cop, really, he looked fresh out of college, a rookie. Still looking to the charred remains of the spire, he raised his pistol to his temple. Christa started towards him. Braydon held her back. Neidemeyer tackled the kid.