Sam went to Demyan, who was clutching the side of his chest. A relatively small wound had blood pouring out of it. Sam tried to block it with part of his vest and direct pressure, but he had no misgivings about the outcome. The bullet must have ripped through a large blood vessel. Without already being in surgery, he would bleed to death within minutes.
Anotoly looked at his son. He grabbed his knife and ran toward the only surviving prisoner. “What have you done!”
Sam turned and watched Anotoly drive the knife into the prisoner’s gut.
There was a small moan, as the knife went in. The prisoner was in agony. He sat rigid on the cold granite floor with his back hard upright against the sarcophagus. Tears of pain squeezed from his eyes and rolled down his once malevolent face.
“Father!” the prisoner said in a voice barely a whisper. “At last I’ve come to visit you in hell.”
“Ilya?” Anotoly asked. “Is that really you?”
There was recognition in Ilya’s eyes. “Father?”
“Ilya! I thought you’d drowned!” Anotoly hugged his son. “You killed your brother! What have I done!”
“Demyan was alive?” Ilya glanced toward Demyan, whose body was now still on the floor, with his unseeing eyes wide open.
“This is all my fault!” Anotoly said. “And it is all because of Leo Botkin!”
The name somehow aroused something inside Ilya. Sam watched him reach into his jacket pocket. Sam moved the barrel of the submachine gun closer as a warning.
“It’s okay,” Ilya said, removing his cell phone.
Sam glanced at the ceiling, where a series of wireless communication hubs were mounted on the ceiling.
Ilya quickly texted a few words and pressed send.
When Ilya dropped the cell phone, Sam picked it up and read the message out loud, “Botkin. We broken the casing. The stone is gaining weight and we don’t know where it needs to be placed.”
Anotoly looked at Sam. “Go! Get to the surface and do what you must with the sacred stone.”
“What about you?”
“My life will be complete when Leo Botkin dies.”
Chapter Sixty-Six
Anotoly dragged both of his now dead sons together and cuddled them as he waited. There he lied still as the dead, waiting for their retribution. It wasn’t long — ten minutes at most — before Leo Botkin walked into the room. He hoped Sam and the rest of his team were able to reach the winch okay and were already on their way to the surface.
Botkin glanced at the pile of wrecked and mangled bodies. He approached Ilya, quickly searching for the sacred stone. He stopped at Ilya and swore. “I should have let you drown you useless piece of shit!”
Anotoly stared at Botkin’s brown eyes and lunged for his throat, digging his thumbs hard into the man’s windpipe. Botkin reacted quickly, pulling his handgun and shooting him in the gut.
Anotoly heard the shots and felt the pain of three razorblades slicing through the soft tissues of his abdomen. He started to laugh. It was short, and intermingled with a blood-stained cough, but it was deep and profoundly satisfying none the less.
“What’s so funny, old man?” Botkin asked.
Anotoly held the grenade hard against Botkin’s chest. “This!”
Botkin tried to move, but Anotoly gripped him with the ferocity of a man who’d borne a hatred for nearly twenty years and was willing to undergo any amount of pain and suffering just to finally have revenge.
The grenade exploded.
Both men were torn to pieces as the grenade’s fragments shredded them. Anotoly hit the ground, his face fixed in a permanent and sardonic grin. Botkin’s face was ripped apart. One of his eyeballs, dislodged from its socket, rolled along the floor, losing its brown contact lens.
The purple eyeball finally came to rest, looking back upon what remained of its owner’s lifetime worth of preparation.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
The fourth sacred stone was placed inside the tomb beneath Sigiriya.
Over the course of the next two weeks, the magnetic poles returned to their normal position. The thermohaline circulation returned to its normal direction and the darkness dissipated from the clouds that had enshroud the earth. Some of the wealthiest men and women, once leaders of the world’s largest multinational corporations, emerged from their place of hiding. Their fortunes having been decimated by an unusual sell-off of their property, cash and assets only a few weeks earlier, the natural distribution of wealth around the globe had never been so equal.
Sam Reilly watched as the darkness above finally gave way to crepuscular rays of sun. He picked up his cell phone and called the Secretary of Defense.
She answered on the first ring, without preamble. “What’s the outcome?”
“It’s finally over.”
The Secretary said, “Not completely. I’m afraid some things have only just begun.”
“Really?” Sam held a tight-lipped smile. “The asteroid’s passed Earth and the ocean’s thermohaline currents are flowing in the right direction again — as far as I see it, everything’s just fine.”
“I read your report on the mission to the temple in Tepui Mountains.”
“And?”
“A Master Builder was found strung up on a stalagmite. Evidently killed by one of his own people.”
“You think there’s going to be a war between the remaining Master Builders?”
“Yes,” she said. “The question is, who’s side are we going to take?”
Chapter Sixty-Eight
The Sikorsky Blackhawk VH-60N VIP designated helicopter landed in the clearing, where more than a hundred marines had secured the forest. The surrounding land dipped into a shallow crater.
As the rotor blades began to wind down, the Secretary of Defense stepped out of the helicopter. A five-star General stepped up to greet her.
“Well.” She said. “Did you find it?”
He grinned. “Yeah, we found it all right.”
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “So, Leo Botkin was right all along. The meteorite did break in two, sending the second fragment of blackbody into a completely different part of the world.”
She ran her eyes across a large, dark stone. Light appeared to be distorting near it. The stone was being lifted by a twin-engine tandem rotor Chinook helicopter.
Her eyes turned and fixed to the man in a white coat next to the General. “The trillion dollar question is, will there be enough of the usable material left?”
The scientist nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
Her tightlipped smile relaxed. “Good. Can you control the material?”
“It will take time. But I believe we can make it work for us.”
“Good. No more setbacks. I want to see the Omega Project up and running within the year. Can you achieve that?”
The scientist smiled decisively. “Yes, ma’am.”