Sam said, “It sounds like it might be the opposite end of the Aleutian Portal.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” the Secretary of Defense replied.
“But it would take at least four days to reach and cross the Aleutian Portal.” Sam glanced out the window. It was almost permanently dark now, despite being the middle of the day. “And we don’t have four days.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“Keep working on it. We’ll head toward Moscow in the meantime. I know someone who might be able to help.”
Sam hung up and called a second number.
Demyan Yezhov picked up on the first ring. “Sam Reilly! If this strange darkness that’s shrouding the world is anything to go by, it appears you haven’t found what you were after yet.”
“We found it, but someone took it from us.”
“Really? That’s bad luck.”
Sam didn’t have time for the chat. “Listen. I need your help. It’s going to take some time to explain why I need this, and I don’t have that time, but I need your expertise as a geologist who grew up in Siberia.”
“Go on.”
“This is what we know. There’s a colony inside an ancient volcanic cave. It’s roughly four hours by jet from Moscow. The ground near the colony was always frozen. There was a lake. From the sky, the lake was shaped like a big boot. In the middle of the lake was an island and what looked like the cooling tower of a geothermic generator.”
“Okay, what do you need?” Demyan asked.
“I need to find the colony. I need a list of known geothermic springs throughout Russia that would be powerful enough to support a population of five thousand people. Also, if you could narrow down any place where large volcanic caves are known to form.”
There was only silence on the phone and for a moment Sam thought he’d been cut off. “Are you still there, Demyan?”
Demyan expelled a large breath of air. “I can do better for that. I can tell you where it is and how to get inside.”
“How?”
“Because that’s Oymyakon where I was born, where I lost my entire family, and where I’ve spent my life vowing I would never return.”
“But you’ll guide us where we need to go?” Sam held his breath.
“To save the human race?” Demyan said. “I’ll go to hell and back.”
Sam unclipped his seatbelt, walked up to the cockpit and said to the pilots, “Change of plan. We’re going to Big Island, Hawaii to pick up someone and then we’re off to Russia.”
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Elise followed the monk as he negotiated the undulating terrain, heading north toward Pidurangala Rock. Monkeys played in the thick foliage of the jungle overhead. They crossed over a series of aqueducts and then, joining a path of stones, began their climb up to Pidurangala Rock.
“Do you know much about the history of my people?” the monk asked.
Elise shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m sure its fascinating, but I hadn’t even heard of Sigiriya until a couple of days ago. I believe you’re Buddhist monks?”
“Yes.” He nodded politely. “It’s okay. We know a lot about you.”
“Why is that?” she asked.
“It is not something we can explain. It does not make sense.”
“But you must be able to tell me something?”
“No. Telling will not do. We must show you. Sometimes only our eyes will accept what our heart knows to be true.”
“You think I need to see the physical proof to accept the spiritual?” she asked.
“That is exactly what I mean. Come, we are not far, now.”
Elise found herself working hard to keep up with the old monk. “Tell me about your people. How long have you been here?”
“The monastery dates back to the arrival of King Kassapa.”
“Your people followed the migration of the king?”
He shook his head and smiled. It was warm and ingratiating. “For many centuries, the monks lived at Sigiriya. When the king commenced construction of the citadel of Sigiriya, the monks were relocated to make room for the king’s palace. To make amends, Kassapa constructed new dwellings and a temple here to recompense them.
“You were kicked out of your own place of worship?”
“Yes. But that did not matter. Our purpose was not obstructed.”
Elise waited for him to elaborate, but instead he remained silent. She felt her calves ache and her thighs burn as she climbed more than a thousand stone steps leading up a steep hillside behind the Pidurangala to a terrace just below the summit of the rock. The monk pointed out the Royal Cave Temple itself as they walked by. Despite the name, there was little to see apart from a long reclining Buddha under a large rock overhang. The statue was accompanied by figures, which the monk pointed out, were of Vishnu and Saman and decorated with very faded murals.
The monk led her down the next terrace and stopped, where an old brick Dagoba — the Sinhalese name for the Buddhist stupa — stood proudly.
Elise waited for the monk to tell her about it, but instead the man remained silent. She ran her eyes across the ancient building. The dark clouds had fully set in on the world and it was getting harder to see much of anything, but she could still make out the shapes of the ancient ruin. She’d read briefly about them previously, but had never been inside one. It was basically a mound-like structure with buried relics, used by Buddhist monks to meditate. This one would be considered quite modest, approximately thirty feet high at most.
The construction of Dagobas were considered acts of great merit. Their purpose being to enshrine relics of Buddha. The entrances were designed to be laid out so that the center lines pointed directly toward the relic chamber. Although little of the cover still remained, the guidebook she’d read on the flight, said that the outer layer was normally coated with lime plaster, white of egg, coconut water, plant resin, drying oil, glues and saliva of white ants.
“Well?” the monk asked.
Elise reciprocated the monk’s monosyllabic response. “Well.”
The monk smiled. It was old and well-practiced, with large creases gave evidence of years of the muscles of his face holding just such a pose. “Would you like to see where you come from?”
Elise smiled. It was more patronizing than she meant it to be. “You think I came from in here?”
The monk wasn’t offended, or if he was, he certainly didn’t show it. His eyes were wide, as though many generations of waiting were finally up. “Let’s go inside and see. Like I said, some things, one must see to accept.”
“It’s getting dark.”
“Good. That will help,” the monk replied, mysteriously.
Elise followed the monk inside. She didn’t believe for a minute that the monk was right and she had come from this region, but then, no one had ever been able to tell her where she had come from. She felt her stomach churn with a strange anticipation. All children, no matter what age they are, want to discover that they came from somewhere and belong to something.
As an orphan, she had grown up in Washington, D.C. When she was eleven years old she won a cryptic mathematics test. It has been surreptitiously added to all public and private schools standard end of year exams for that year. It had been a test, set by the CIA, in search of child prodigies, mathematically geniuses, people with a certain type of analytical mind who could be groomed into perfect code-breakers for the next generation — where the internet was the front-line of some of the greatest intelligence wars ever fought.
The CIA became her family. In her early twenties, that family had betrayed her, and after setting up a digital trail for a new identity, she disappeared. Since then she’d been working with Sam Reilly, who recognized her unique skill set. The crew of the Maria Helena were her new family and she was happy. Eight weeks ago, in the Amazon jungle, some truths she had often wondered about, came to surface, and she knew what she’d always known — she was genetically different. She had purple eyes, inhuman reflexes, and shared an active posterior lobe in her cerebellum that was dormant in others, and was capable of receiving high frequency radio waves in the form of images.