With her free hand, Peta tore open the skirt’s hook and loop closure, and the skirt dropped away. Arthur must have regained a modicum of control because the chopper lifted and angled back over the helipad, bringing her shoes to within a yard or so of the surface.
That was more than good enough for Peta. She released her grip and dropped onto the hard concrete surface.
The relief of feeling something solid beneath her gave way to a blast of pain as her right ankle buckled. Instinctively she rolled as she fell, and felt the piece slip from her bra and tumble away…
…to land at Frik’s feet…almost as if it wanted to be there.
He snatched it up and raised it above his head. The beam of light focused on the piece, making it look like he held a blue sun against the night sky.
“You gave me a bad moment there, Peta!” Frik said, shouting over the noise of the chopper. “I thought we were going to lose this!”
He ran toward the penthouse, brushing past Ray, McKendry, and Keene, who were hurrying forward to help Peta. She struggled to her feet. Her ankle blazed with gut-wrenching agony. She glanced up and saw that Arthur had full control of the chopper now. Removing the piece had worked. She gave him a thumbs-up. He nodded gravely through the bubble.
She turned back to the other men and pointed toward Frik’s retreating back. “Stop him!”
Her shout was lost in the wind and the engine noise, and she doubted McKendry and Keene would have been much use anyway. They stood frozen on the helipad, eyes fixed on the chopper, gaping at Arthur. She saw Keene grab Ray by his shirt and point to the chopper, shouting something she couldn’t hear, doubtless something about a dead man piloting an aircraft.
No help there. Ignoring the stab of pain each step sent up her leg, she hobbled after Frik on her own. He had all of the pieces now. If she didn’t do something right away, he would assemble the artifact and take possession of it. Too many people had died because of his obsession. She couldn’t let him have control of it.
She stepped through the sliding glass door into the great room and stopped. Frik was nowhere to be seen. He had what he wanted. Could he already have gone?
A bright blue glow from the rear doorway answered her. She reached the lab and found Frik hovering over the four assembled pieces, guiding hers—the fifth and last—toward its position.
Her piece clicked into place. Immediately, the glow disappeared. The device sat cold and dark and apparently inert on the workbench, looking for all the world like nothing more than an oddly mottled Easter egg with an extra nodule on one side.
It was as if Frik had turned off a light.
He turned to face her. “What is this, Peta? Another goddamn fake?” He pulled over a metallic briefcase that sat open on the lab table. “I’ll just have to take this back to my own labs and figure it out.” He extended his scarred left hand toward the object.
She lunged, reaching for it with both hands. Though she did not yet fully understand why she felt so passionately about it, every instinct told her to stop Frik from removing the device. He grabbed her arms. She struggled to release herself from his grasp.
Suddenly, time seemed to slow down. She watched as if through a heat mirage as a ripple ran over the surface of the spheroid, followed by another and another, blurring the edges of the separate pieces. Fusing them into a single object.
At its center, a tiny spot of bright white began to glow, and then light was everywhere, blasting through Peta like a storm wind through a screen door, engulfing her in heat like the heart of the sun. Consuming her and everything around her.
43
When the white light faded and she began to recover her senses, Peta thought for a moment that the world had been turned on end. But the problem wasn’t the world. She was the one who was upside down, lying on the floor of Ray’s penthouse lab, staring up at the underside of the main table and the solid gray line of the ceiling beyond it.
Reoriented, she jumped to her feet. Her body responded at once, but she felt weightless, as if she had floated to a standing position in a flying dream.
On the table, the artifact had returned to a state she could only think of as dormant. It looked like nothing more than a chunk of rutilated quartz from somewhere in Arizona, or a pretty colored rock that some collector had picked up on Montserrat to remind himself that a sleeping volcano could look like any other mountain until it erupted.
“What the fuck?”
Frikkie’s left hand appeared on the far side of the table as he pulled himself up off the floor. Staring at it, Peta flashed on what it had looked like minutes ago as he’d reached for the artifact: severely scarred from the fire that had killed Paul Trujold. Now, it wasn’t scarred at all. The skin looked smooth and healthy.
No amount of plastic surgery or expert grafting could have achieved that result in so short a time, she thought, as Frik’s head came into view.
Immediately, she noticed that the scarring on his face was gone too, as was the damage to his eyelid, which had given him the permanent sleepy-eyed look of a myasthenic in the throes of crisis.
That was when it occurred to her that she was standing with her full weight on her twisted ankle, but there was no pain. Her side and back, which should have been covered with cuts, bruises, and abrasions from her ride on the runner of the helicopter, felt fine. If anything, she felt as if she had just come from an hour with a masseur. She reminded herself that she was a physician, a scientist. Perfect cures didn’t happen this way, in a split second. Miracles, as they said, took a little longer.
Reluctantly, she acknowledged the certainty that had been taking shape in her mind. It had to be the artifact. There simply was no other answer. They had both touched it; they were both made whole.
She shook her head at herself and her ridiculous willingness to believe in magic. Fact: Antibiotics and aspirin were miracles. Fact: People couldn’t walk on water without webbed feet.
Fact: That thing over there was not God any more than Frik was the devil.
In the throes of intellectualizing, Peta almost missed seeing Frik reach out to grab the device. Using a reserve of strength she didn’t know she had, she shoved him away from it. Taken by surprise, he staggered backward. His carotid pumped.
“Out of my way, bitch!”
Frik’s rage at Peta’s continued attempts to thwart him was palpable. She braced herself for his assault.
“I suggest you move away from the artifact, Frikkie.” Arthur stood framed in the doorway into the lab.
Frik stopped in his tracks. Very slowly, like someone in an Abbott and Costello movie, he swiveled around. It occurred to Peta that the Afrikaner had been so busy grabbing for the piece of the artifact she had dropped that he hadn’t taken the time to notice who was piloting the helicopter.
“I wish everyone would stop looking at me as if I were a ghost.” Arthur stepped into the lab. “If you want to find out how alive I am, why don’t you try to touch that device.”
“Why don’t you try to stop me.”
Frik took a step toward the table. Arthur moved to intercept him. The Afrikaner spun on his heel and charged at his old friend.
Caught off-guard by Frik’s change in direction, Arthur didn’t have time to brace himself. The two men tumbled, ass over elbows, through the door and back into the great room.
Recovering his feet, Frik grabbed Arthur by the jacket and lifted him into the air. As he rose, Arthur thrust out his leg, catching Frik in the groin just as Ray and McKendry and Keene charged in from the helipad.
Arthur bounced lightly to his feet. “Stay out of this. He’s mine.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Frikkie said in a stage whisper.
It had become obvious to Peta that an all-out physical battle between Arthur and Frik was inevitable. Arthur was taller, Frik broader. They weighed about the same, and since the miraculous actions of the artifact, both were fit and hugely strong. Without intervention, it would be anybody’s victory.