Tishenko’s guards kept a firm grip on him as the hoist climbed upwards. Max stayed alert, searching for anything that might come to his aid when he escaped, because escape he would-he needed to be certain Angelo Farentino wasn’t lying.
Max figured the hoist was a crude lift mechanism used only for these lower levels. Tunnels hewn from the rock face went off in different directions on each floor they passed. Generators, power plants and general storage would be down here.
The hoist stopped and the men pushed him off the platform, across a more cared-for area and into a sleek, modern lift. Moments later Fedir Tishenko turned to face him when the express lift’s doors opened. Max’s stomach lurched. A stocky man with skin like a lizard’s looked at him. Half his face was covered in hair as dense as fur. It was fur, Max realized, trimmed close to the puckered skin. Max kept his reaction under control.
An armed guard stood over Sharkface. Max hadn’t seen the sky in hours, but now he looked through the massive window cut in the rock face. This must be three thousand meters high. A blue velvet sky shimmered with stars. You could almost reach out and take a handful, but what held Max’s attention was the cloud base a thousand or more meters below. The black carpet would cut out the night if he were on the ground, but from up here it swirled, in a conflicting tide, and small lightning flashes ricocheted through the dense cover.
Tishenko saw Max’s fascination. “That is a damp firework display compared to the apocalyptic event that will take place in only a few hours. My name is Fedir Tishenko. Where is Zabala’s stone?” He tossed the useless pendant at Max.
So, Max realized, Sharkface had landed himself in it.
“Where is my friend?” Max said, daring to bluff confidently.
“He is dead.”
No way. Max wasn’t going to accept that Sayid was dead until he saw his body. This monster was trying to scare him. Max didn’t show his emotions. “That’s a pity. He had the stone.”
“Oh, brave try, young Mr. Gordon. You have dogged my ambitions for some time now. We searched the boy, he had nothing. You, however, are the kind of threat I could make no allowances for in my plans. You have it. You must. Why else are you here, other than to make a futile attempt at stopping me.”
“I’m here for my friend.”
“But you did not know he was here until a few hours ago. Who told you?”
“No one,” Max lied. He looked at Sharkface. “I saw your thug here kill Peaches.”
“Why am I not surprised to hear that? Ruthless ambition can do strange things to a person. And then?”
“I followed him here.”
“Liar! No one followed me! I swear it!” Sharkface yelled, desperate for his life.
Max smiled. “You’re rubbish, mate. I could have followed you with my eyes closed in the middle of the night. You led me right here. I found Bobby Morrell’s van, and my friend left a clue there for me.”
Max was looking around, taking in as much as he could. There were big screens dotted around the room. Satellite pictures from space. Gathering storms across the Atlantic. Cold-weather, low-pressure fronts projected across Europe and a swirling, snakelike coil of clouds twisting towards the Alps. That was the expected monster of a storm. Hours away.
Max tightened his stomach muscles and faced the disfigured man. “Your people have been so careless it’s downright sloppy. If you think you’re going to rule the world or whatever insane scheme you’ve got planned, you should hire better staff.”
There was a stunned silence. And then Fedir Tishenko did something he could not remember ever doing before-he laughed.
“All right, you have courage. And you did not cringe when you saw my face. I like that. I am going to show you something.” He curled his finger, beckoning Max to him.
Max stepped farther into the room, which angled away. A CGI map of Europe filled the wall. It was easy for Max to see exactly where he was. Red veins crisscrossed the map.
“You know what this is? What those lines are?” Tishenko said.
Max didn’t, but it wasn’t difficult to guess. “Telluric currents.”
“Very good,” Tishenko acknowledged. “Watch.”
Tishenko pressed a button, and an electronic clock appeared in one corner and the hours and minutes spun fast-forward. The projected path of the storm centered over Lake Geneva, and at the Citadel mountain a huge graphic flash appeared-a rod of golden light shafted into the three-dimensional mountain, and a shock wave of energy rippled downwards and out along the veins. Surrounding mountains crumpled, the lake burst like a water-filled balloon and every red line on the map glowed. It was as if the sun had exploded belowground. A black swathe of destruction collapsed a path across Europe.
It was, Max realized, the complete and utter devastation of a huge area. That was a shock he could not disguise.
“Now I see you understand. Zabala knew of the geophysical danger here. Switzerland is fragile, and his original prediction almost came true twenty-odd years ago. But they reinforced the tunnels at the nuclear research center-then they thought they were safe. And Zabala was ridiculed. I offered them billions of dollars to include my regeneration proposal, but the governments involved did not dare accept my challenge.”
“So all of this is about revenge and death on a big scale?” Max said.
“No. This is about revenge and life on a gargantuan scale. Do you understand metamorphosis? The changing of man into beast?”
Max could only nod, his own dark world of shapeshifting still a mystery to him.
Tishenko pointed a remote control at the far wall. It was merely a screen. Shuttered steel slid to one side. He gestured with pride and stepped onto a narrow gangway. Max had never before seen anything like the huge shimmering light that lay a hundred meters or more below them. It was a spiked crystal. It must have measured twenty meters across and thirty high. Its jagged arms were like miniature missiles pointing outwards at every angle.
“Geothermal water in the mountain created this. I discovered it when I first started tunneling. Within the crystal is life.”
Max looked down. Copper-colored conduits, each ten meters thick, locked the crystal into steel girders twice its size, securing it to the rock face. Behind that, hundreds of meters beyond the vast cathedral-sized tunnel, was what appeared to be a gigantic fan. It was so enormous that it filled the height of the room. Max thought it looked like a huge generator whose blades would feed power into, and light up, the crystal.
“Many years ago the Japanese perfected a technique of storing DNA in a crystal, using liquid nitrogen. They froze every cell into deep hibernation. And then the experiment was stopped. They were afraid of what life form they might create. But I am not.”
Tishenko stepped closer. Max curled his toes in his trainers, imagining he was gripping the floor to stop himself from backing away.
“Regeneration. I found people like me, scorned and rejected by our so-called civilized society. I found the emotionally wounded, and those who struggled to keep the demons in their minds at bay, and those whose bodies were malformed, whose twisted limbs caused fear in others but whose minds were scalpel sharp. I offered these people everything. I bought their intelligence, I secured their loyalty and I offered them a new life in the future. Just as I have decided to offer you a new life,” Tishenko said quietly, in awe of his own power.
Before Max could say anything, two of the armed men grabbed him and sat him in a chair. A white-coated man, whom Max hadn’t noticed before, stepped forward. He carried a small kidney-shaped dish and a hypodermic. Max struggled, heaved and pushed, but one man held his head in a viselike grip and two others held his arms and legs down in the chair. The needle slipped into the vein in the crook of Max’s arm and the white-coated man drew a vial of blood. A small Band-Aid was carefully placed over the puncture wound.