They broke down the door to the room where they had determined the tsar hid every morning and were briefly stunned to see a stone coffin resting on a pedestal. Since there was no other way out of the room, and they had seen Tsar Ivan go in, they had to assume he was inside. Throwing off their shock, they wrapped the iron chains they had brought for the tsar’s legs and arms around the coffin and locked them in place. They were rewarded with the lid lifting the inch of slack that was in the chain and their tsar screaming dire threats at them, demanding that they remove the chains.
Having committed themselves, they knew they could not turn back. They dragged the coffin out of the room as the tsar continued to scream at them. They pulled it along the tunnels built under the Kremlin by the tsars, and those before the tsars, as escape routes in case of exactly what was happening at that moment — a coup — or invasion. They reached a deep, narrow shaft that went down over 150 feet. It was the remains of an attempt years earlier to reach water before someone realized the Moscow River was not even that far away laterally and a tunnel was dug to that water source.
The captain of the guard had the men place the coffin on the lid of the well.
This was better than the river, he decided, thinking of the long walk back to the surface.
They tipped the coffin on edge. It wavered, then turned vertical, sliding down out of sight, just a bit smaller than the circumference of the shaft. Seconds later the thud of the coffin hitting the bottom of the shaft reverberated up to them.
THE PRESENT
CHAPTER 12
Gentlemen, are we in agreement?” Nosferatu sat down in the chair at the head of the table and shifted his gaze between the two men.
“I will do my part,” Tian Dao Lin said. Both then turned and looked at Adrik. “I can recover that which the KGB has,” Adrik said. “What is your timetable for all of this?”
“The X-craft launches in three days. It will take it about twelve hours to rendezvous with the derelict mothership and drain the bodies. Then it will land at an airfield close to here. At that time I will begin processing the blood. Ninety hours.”
“That is not much time to get someone up Everest to recover the blood from the Ones Who Wait,” Tian Dao Lin said.
“No, but it is possible,” Nosferatu replied.
“I will make it happen,” Tian Dao Lin averred.
Nosferatu stood. “I will see you gentlemen back here in four days.”
Four days. Vampyr stared at the intelligence report that had just been forwarded to him, then walked over to the large bay windows in his mansion overlooking Puget Sound and the lights of Seattle beyond. It was a magnificent view, one that he had enjoyed for the past ten years, ever since purchasing his own private island in the Sound at an outrageous cost.
Money meant nothing to Vampyr. His assets were under so many different names and umbrella corporations that it would take a roomful of accountants several lifetimes to figure it all out, which was appropriate in Vampyr’s view, as it had taken him the equivalent of many lifetimes to accumulate it.
He did not pursue money for itself, but for what it could bring, which was a form of power. There were many forms of power and Vampyr, since his time in Sparta, had dedicated large amounts of his time to studying them all.
He had used his money to hide himself, most particularly during the recent world war in which the humans, most surprisingly, had defeated the Airlia. In all his long life Vampyr had never anticipated that the humans would be capable of such a feat. He had prepared for one side or the other of the Airlia to gain the upper hand if they ever came out of their deep sleep underneath Qian-ling or on Mars but the human victory was totally unexpected.
The Grail was lost. Lisa Duncan had made sure of that, taking it and the second mothership down with her into the array on Mars. In Vampyr’s opinion, a most brave but stupid action. He did appreciate that she had stopped the Airlia from getting a message out to others of their kind, but losing the Grail was a tremendous blow. It had always been his primary plan to recover the Grail once it was located and use it to gain the immortality the high priests had chanted about since Atlantis.
Now he felt like he had come full circle. It was all about blood. But Airlia blood now. He knew exactly what the Eldest, Nosferatu, wished to do. But he had learned one thing over his many incarnations among the humans — power could only be wielded by one. While the Eldest was so focused on bringing back Nekhbet, Vampyr did not trust him. And then there was Tian Dao Lin and Adrik. Four was three too many in Vampyr’s opinion.
He turned from the large, bulletproof windows and went over to the large globe in his study. The walls of the room were lined with books, many of them ancient, original texts that scholars would weep with envy just to be given a glimpse of. They were not for show, as Vampyr had read all of them.
Vampyr placed his hands on the globe and slowly spun it. Everest. Moscow. And in the derelict mothership in orbit.
Nosferatu and the other two were moving. Vampyr knew that power, like chess, was all about move and countermove. And allowing one’s opponent to set his own destruction in motion.
Patience. Four days was but a blink of the eye in the eternity that Vampyr had lived, but he knew it was long enough.
Time to move a few pieces.
CHAPTER 13
The Highest point above the surface of the Earth is the peak of Mount Everest. At 29,028 feet high, it is the highest and most inaccessible place on the surface of the planet. The perfect place to hide the key to the Master Guardian, which controlled all of the Airlia computers — the legendary sword of Arthur: Excalibur.
The race to recover it had been brutal. On one side had been Mike Turcotte and Professor Mualama. On another, two Navy SEALs turned into Guides by a Guardian computer and questing for the key in order to bring it to Aspasia’s Shadow. On the third front, Chinese military forces led by three Ones Who Wait, human-Airlia clones who served Artad. Even on Turcotte’s end all had not been as it appeared, as it turned out that Mualama had been corrupted by a Swarm tentacle and had tried to destroy the sword, only to be thwarted by Turcotte at the last moment.
In the end, Turcotte had emerged victorious, literally the last man standing on the mountain, Excalibur in his hand, and that had allowed Yakov, inside the last mothership hidden in Mount Ararat, to gain control of the Master Guardian, and thus all other guardians, allowing the world to win World War III and compel the alien forces to leave.
Littered on the slopes of Everest were the bodies of those who had failed in this quest: SEALs, Chinese, Mualama, and — last but not least — the three Ones Who Wait. They mingled with the bodies of 160 climbers who had died in their attempt at summiting over the years. Most of those bodies lay in the “death zone” above 25,000 feet.
Everest was not considered a particularly difficult climb in terms of technique, but the collection of avalanches, crevasses, winds up to 125 miles an hour, storms, temperatures that went down to forty degrees below zero and oxygen depletion make it the deadliest place on the planet. In the death zone the air holds only one-third the oxygen present at sea level. As a result high-altitude pulmonary edema (when the lungs fatally fill with fluid) and high-altitude cerebral edema (when the brain, starved for oxygen, swells) are common, often causing death unless the person is quickly brought down the mountain, something that is practically impossible as the death zone is above the reach of even the best helicopter’s altitude ceiling.