After a few seconds, the shooting stopped. Something flashed through the air, hit the wall behind Professor and rebounded away, skittering across the steps and ultimately sailing out into the abyss. It was a gun. Shah’s gun. One less thing to worry about.
She raised her head and caught a glimpse of Shah running, still dragging the dark haired woman behind him. He was on the far side of the shaft, nearly at the top of the stairs, and even though Professor was closing the gap, it seemed unlikely that he would be able to catch Shah in time to stop him from slipping through the exit passage. Nevertheless, Jade’s sense of the place told her that close might be good enough. The ancient architects of the vault had designed the lock room to function like the automatic doors at a supermarket. As long as Professor was within reach of the exit, the mechanism would not reset.
Suddenly the stairwell erupted with another blizzard of gunfire. The incoming storm of bullets and debris was so intense, it forced Jade to retreat back down the spiraling steps until she was almost directly below the exit, out of the shooter’s line of fire.
Professor scrambled back down to her position. “Son of bitch brought reinforcements,” he growled. Before she could think to ask what Professor meant, he pointed at the pistol in her hand. “Let me have that. I’m out.”
She passed it over. “How many?”
“Too many. But unless you know of a back door, the only way out of here is—”
Before he could finish, an ominous grinding sound filled the shaft as the steps on which they were standing, and all the others above and below, began moving.
THIRTY
Shah crawled down the cramped passage, one hand stretched awkwardly back to drag Gabrielle along. Though he had only been in the vault a short while, he was desperate to be in the open, breathing fresh air again. Perhaps having the sky above him again would help to purge his memory of the things that had been revealed to him, but somehow he doubted it. The truth would haunt him to the end of his days.
Gabrielle was sobbing behind him. That was something new. In all the time they had worked together, all the intimate moments they had shared—all a lie—he had never seen her cry. Her despair comforted him. She had brought his world crashing down; a little suffering was the least he could hope for.
He would put an end to her misery soon enough.
The jihadists’ arrival could not have been more timely. Though he had only been able to give them vague directions in his text messages, the men had correctly divined the significance of the little cave in the sheer face of Bell Rock and rigged their own belay lines in order to transport the material he had requested and expedite his escape. Two were waiting in the niche at the end of the passage. The others were bringing up the rear, wriggling through the passage behind him. Shah did not know if Jade and Professor would attempt to follow, but if they tried, it would only hasten their inevitable appointment with fate. He could not allow them to leave the vault.
He emerged from the cramped passage and hauled Gabrielle forward. She went sprawling and would have tumbled out through the mouth of the cave if the two jihadists, uncertain of his intentions toward her, had not caught her.
Shah did not actually know why he had brought her along. He should have left her behind, both as a practical matter and a moral one. She was the enemy, his enemy and the enemy of Islam, and she always had been. Every word she had uttered, and a thousand implicit promises never spoken, were false. Everything they shared, a deceit. And yet, here she was, still alive.
What power does she have over me?
Gabrielle raised her head. She had lost her sunglasses during their transit to the surface. Her tear streaked eyes staring at nothing. “Atash,” she wailed. “What have you done?”
Shah choked on his disbelief. “What have I done? I?”
Her head turned toward the sound of his voice. “You have everything. You have seen. You are the Mahdi. The Prophet returned. I did this for you.”
Rage in Shah’s chest like steam in a geyser. She actually believed she had done him a favor. “I guess you never really understood me at all then.”
He turned to the nearest jihadist and held out his hand. The man placed a pistol in his palm. “Did you bring what I asked you to?”
One of the others — the young man from California, the geologist’s son — stepped forward. “Only about fifty pounds. All I could get my hands on.”
“It’s enough.” He pointed up to the passage leading into the vault. “Place it there.”
As the jihadists set about their task, he placed the muzzle of the pistol against the back of Gabrielle’s head. Before he pulled the trigger, he leaned close and whispered in her ear. “I didn’t see anything.”
THIRTY-ONE
In a matter of seconds, the stairwell transformed into something else. The blocks that had arranged themselves in an orderly spiral began to shift and slide, changing position with mechanical precision. Some disappeared altogether, sliding into recesses in the wall, their purpose served, while others protruded further, tilting and rotating, rising or falling, reassembling the spherical chamber that was the entrance to the vault.
Professor grabbed Jade’s arm and was about to start up the treacherous steps but Jade pulled free. “No! Down!”
“We’ll be trapped in here!”
There was no time to explain to him that trapped was preferable to being dumped down the full length of the vertical shaft or crushed between blocks of stone, so she let her actions do the talking. She turned away from him and started down the stairs, or rather tried to. Negotiating the descent was part fun-house, part obstacle course. Every step took her from one moving surface to another and she wasted precious seconds with each move just to keep her balance. They were nearly clear of the blocks that were rising to form the sphere. Below, the steps were simply retreating into the walls, all the way down the landing. If they could not reach the passage back to the rotunda before the steps vanished, they would fall into the cistern below, as Jade had done earlier, but from more than twice the height.
“Shortcut!” Jade shouted. Instead of trying to corkscrew her way down the rapidly disappearing passage, she launched herself out across the chasm, landing on the lower steps on the opposite side. Her momentum, along with the movement of the block upon which she landed, carried her into the wall, but she pushed off and jumped again, arcing across the ever-widening gap to the next level. Professor had evidently decided to trust her judgment; he too was caroming back and forth from one side of the spiral to the other, but as the blocks slid back into the wall, the distance across the chasm increased while the potential landing zones continued to diminish.
Jade saw the landing, what little was left of it anyway, ten feet below. The wedge-shaped blocks, which had caught her climbing rope during her initial fall, were in full retreat — less than six inches remained, and even if by some stroke of luck she managed to make the nearly twenty-foot leap and stick the landing, the blocks would be gone completely before she could reach the opening to the rotunda, so she decided to skip a step and go straight for her goal. She turned forty-five degrees to aim herself at the passage, then jumped straight up, planting her feet against the wall and pushed off like an Olympic swimmer making a turn.
Yet, even as she straightened her legs, propelling herself out into space, she knew in her heart that she was going to fall short of her target. The difference would be miniscule, just a few inches, but those inches would make all the difference. She would slam into the wall just below the entrance, and then fall once more into the cistern below.