She was chasing the sun.
The Atlantic crossing seemed to take forever, though the same journey that she was making in minutes would take hours by jet airplane. She wondered how much time had passed in the Hypogeum, and to what destination Kellogg’s dreams had taken him.
Land masses came into view, nothing recognizable, but she knew enough about geography to assume that she was seeing the islands of the Caribbean. They too passed beneath her as she continued west, toward the blazing orb of the sun. More land now, and no ocean beyond. North America, Mexico perhaps? No, that great brown smudge had to be the Mississippi River pouring into the Gulf.
The landscape began to make a little more sense now. The sea of brown earth flatter even than the Atlantic Ocean had to be Texas. The southern extremity of the Continental Divide and a patch of white gypsum sand, like snow in the middle of the black desert — New Mexico. She knew this country well, had flown over it dozens of times. There was the Mogollon Rim, the great chasm of the Grand Canyon….
Now she was descending, falling from the sky. Falling towards….
Why am I seeing this?
For the first time since the journey began, it occurred to her that she might have been wrong about everything. This was not a dream, not the product of infrasound and her fevered imagination.
The Hypogeum was showing her the route to a destination, just as it had shown Archimedes two thousand years before. A specific place, and there, a door with a fantastic mechanical lock that could only be opened….
Roche had been wrong. Paolo and his Freemason brethren, too. The Hypogeum was not the vault. It was the map that showed the way to the vault.
The very idea was so preposterous that, if she had not been experiencing it for herself, she would have dismissed it out of hand. The Oracle Room had been created in such a way as to stimulate specific regions of the human brain to produce exactly this result. Yet, what was so strange about that? Audio and video recordings were nothing more than specific frequencies of electromagnetic energy, easily rendered into digital patterns, and then reconstituted into light and sound. Couldn’t the same thing be done to the human brain?
It really is a mind movie.
The door to the vault appeared, a circular chamber ringed by circles that turned this way and that, sometimes appearing to be linked like the Olympic rings, but somehow never crossing.
I know where this is, Jade thought.
Suddenly the image before her fractured, as if someone had thrown an enormous rock through the television screen in her mind, and Jade was wrenched out of the sublime vision and into the chaos of reality.
Shah’s bullet missed Jade by a country mile, which was not a completely unexpected outcome given his inexperience. He had thought of it as more a signal for his men to open fire than an actual attack. In the final accounting, it would not matter whose bullet actually killed Jade; only that he had fired first.
But no other shots were fired.
Just as the mirror array in the Archimedes museum had focused the spotlight into a searing ray of heat, the unique shape of the Oracle Room had focused the report of the pistol into a deafening sonic assault that brought everyone in the chamber to their knees. He dropped the pistol, clapped his hands to his head as if he might squeeze the noise out of his skull. He thought his head might actually come apart if he let go.
The effect reached its agonizing climax almost immediately and then died away as quickly as the echoes of the shot itself, but recovering from the staggering decibel levels took considerably longer. As a still-grimacing Shah groped for both his light and his gun, he glimpsed a pair of figures — Jade and the other man — making a mad dash past the gunmen.
“No!” Shah rasped. “Not again.”
His fumbling fingers found the gun. He whirled around, trying to line up another shot, but immediately realized the foolishness of such an action. “Hold your—”
One of his men fired at the moving targets and another freight train of agony slammed through Shah’s head.
“Damn it!”
Yet, somehow, the second episode wasn’t quite as bad as the first. Maybe the damage to his hearing had inoculated him against further pain. He endured the pain with a grimace and kept his eyes open long enough to see Jade go down.
Although the first shot had disrupted the tone from the frequency generator, shattering the infrasound spell and snapping Jade out of the vision, she had not actually heard the report. Her abrupt return — figuratively speaking — had left her disoriented but she was in far better shape than the wriggling figures on the floor at the entrance. Though she could barely see them, she had little doubt that these were the same men who had attacked them at the Arkimedeion. She did not immediately grasp what had caused their debilitation, but the tang of sulfur in the air revealed that someone had fired a pistol. She had not heard it because the same acoustical trick that gave the Oracle Room its power had caused the sound waves to almost perfectly cancel each other out at the center of the room where she had been standing. The shot itself had sounded muffled and distant to her ears.
She was not so sheltered when the second shot rang out.
The bullet creased the air next to her ear, but the amplified report blasted her off her feet and sent her reeling through the doorway to the Oracle Room.
Kellogg, who had been stunned by the noise of the first shot, managed to stay on his feet and dragged her onward, out of the line of fire.
More shots sounded, accompanied by the noise of bullets slamming into the limestone walls. Dust and rock chips filled the air but none of the rounds found their target, and as soon as the pair was out of the bell-shaped chamber, the decibel level dropped like a stone.
Jade stumbled along behind Kellogg, her wits still jumbled, part of her brain still trying to process what she had seen during her out-of-body excursion. Was it just something that had arisen randomly from her unconscious mind? A dream? All she knew for certain was that she had woken up to a nightmare.
How did they find us here? I didn’t tell anyone….
A sliver of doubt wormed into the fractured jigsaw puzzle of her awareness. She had made a critical mistake.
The realization brought her fully back to the moment. Her quest for the vault, whatever it really was, would have to wait until she wasn’t being chased by a gang of killers. She pulled free of Kellogg’s grasp and sprinted out ahead of him, following the metal floor back to the stairs, bounding up them three at a time. A few seconds later, she was threading her way through the museum building, following the dim glow of overhead exit signs.
It was déjà vu all over again. Her enemies had tracked her down — again — trapped her underground — again — and now she was running for her life. Again. The only consolation was that the men trying to kill her seemed incapable of learning from their failures.
The thought had barely formed when a man stepped out of the shadows, directly between her and the doorway. Jade’s eyes were drawn, not to his face, but to the dark and all too familiar shape of the pistol braced in his outstretched hands and aimed right at her.
Because her gaze was fixed on the gun, she did not see a third arm appear above the gunman’s right shoulder and snake around his neck. It was only when his head tilted back sharply and then twisted halfway around with a sickening crack, the unfired gun falling from nerveless fingers, that she realized there was someone else there.