Threshold (51 page)

“Depth?” King asked.

Knight aimed a laser range finder down the hole. “Two hundred feet.”

“Measure out one-ninety and throw it in,” King said to Bishop, who was uncoiling a large spool of titanium cable.

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.

He didn’t notice the stepped ceiling or the faces of the eight other statues wrapping around the room. He paid no attention to the tables stationed over a dark brown stain on the stone floor, or the lab equipment and specimen cages they held. He only saw Richard Ridley.

Two of him.

They stood to either side of a third man, whose body and head were concealed by a hooded cloak. But he appeared disfigured somehow, like a hunchback. The three men were speaking with hushed voices, impossible to discern. In fact, King wasn’t certain what language they were speaking.

Then it hit him, they’re speaking the mother tongue!

But were they having a conversation or doing something more nefarious?

King’s question was answered by a puff of grit that fell from above. He saw it fall slowly past his face and land on his arm. He turned his head up, tracing the fallen dirt’s path back up.

Two football-sized blue eyes, twisted with rage, stared back at him. The statue’s head had turned around! Its puglike nose was pulled up to reveal a snarling mash of sharp teeth. Though clearly Sumerian, the statues were not designed to look human. Not fully human at least.

Before he could move or shout a warning to Alexander, the statue sprang to life, wrapping its large arms around his ribs in a crushing bear hug. He marveled at the speed and silence with which the golem moved. It seemed Ridley was perfecting the art. Then the pain struck as his body was pinned in a stone embrace. His weapon and gear pushed against his body, making struggling painful and escape impossible. He pummeled the golem a few times, but his efforts were fruitless. It couldn’t feel pain.
Hell,
King thought,
it probably can’t feel anything.

He was lifted off the ground and turned around. Twenty feet away, Alexander was being treated similarly, though his arms were pinned to his sides while King’s remained free. But he continued to fight against his bonds. The injuries Alexander received were healing as quickly as he inflicted them on himself, but even he was unable to break free.

The two Richard Ridleys and the hooded man faced the pair.

Ridley’s voice filled the chamber, “Welcome, King,” but neither of the Ridleys had spoken.

The man in the middle is also Ridley,
King thought.
Ridley 1.0. But what’s wrong with his body?

“And our unknown adversary I presume?” Ridley said.

King saw the cloaked figure’s hood turn toward Alexander as he spoke, confirming his suspicion that he was also Ridley.

“We have much in common, you and I,” Ridley said. “Though you seem to lack my ambition.”

Alexander remained silent, his arms shaking as he tried to pull them free of the golem’s grasp.

“Or is it that you just lack the brains? After all, you were born into a world that was flat. You would have had no concept of the world as a whole. I respect what you’ve done, the lives you’ve lived. But you have been small-minded for thousands of years. Of course, you didn’t have the mother tongue. It was gone before your time. Even if you could speak the language, the lack of technology would have created logistical problems. How could you reach a planet full of people?

“Happily, that’s no longer a problem.” Ridley reached into his pocket and pulled out a flash drive. “Fifteen seconds of audio to change the world. When I’m done there will be one language again. One god. The human race will be united under me for all time.”

Ridley turned back to the table, opened a laptop, and plugged in the flash drive. King followed the cable leading out of the laptop. It hung down to the floor. From there, the cable stretched out between two of the statues and ended at a row of blinking servers. He hadn’t noticed them before, hidden in the darkness. Several more cables came out of the servers, many descending into the stone floor, and just as many rising up through the ceiling.

“You’re connected to the whole world?” King asked.

As the computer booted, Ridley turned around. “It’s a simple matter really, though not possible without the help of my Russian friends. How is Rook, by the way? Did he run into any trouble in Siberia?”

King remained stoic. Rook’s fate was something he couldn’t worry about right now.