“Oh, the Sepulcher exists, all right. I went back to the original documents and finally understood that the clues were there all along. I just hadn’t looked at them in the right way.”
“You found the Sepulcher?”
“Indeed.”
“And it’s here in the valley?”
“Absolutely.”
“Where?”
“That would be too easy. It’s up to you to find it. If you do, you win.”
“And Amanda goes free.”
“Provided she overcomes the remaining obstacles.”
“Then I don’t have time to chat.”
Balenger broke the transmission and put the phone away. He removed the packet of Kleenex from his shirt pocket and took out a piece. He tore it in half, wadded the sections, and shoved them into his ears. Then he raised the Mini-14, peered through its site, and lined up its red dot with what he’d discovered in the upper branches of an aspen tree: a video camera. He hadn’t fired a rifle since he was in Iraq a year and a half earlier. Shooting was a perishable skill. Accuracy depended on practice. Hoping that the holographic gunsight would compensate, he held his breath and pulled the trigger.
Even with Kleenex wadded in his ears, the sound of the shot was palpable. The rifle bucked, an empty shell flipping away. He looked toward the camera in the branches fifty yards away, twenty feet up in the tree. A dark hole in the bark below the camera warned him that he’d jerked the trigger, lowering the barrel.
He aimed again. This time, he squeezed instead of jerking. Crack. The recoil swept through him. Fragments of the camera flew through the air. The rest of it dangled from an electrical wire.
He walked along the trees and saw another camera in the aspens, about fifty yards farther down. The valley was presumably flanked with them. So many cameras, so many corresponding screens. Balenger knew it would be impossible for the Game Master to watch all the monitors. Some kind of motion sensor probably activated individual screens if a human-shaped figure came into view.
Well, here’s another image that won’t take up his time, Balenger thought. He raised the rifle, lined up the red dot, squeezed the trigger, and blew the camera to pieces. The BlackBerry vibrated in his pocket. He ignored it.
He kept walking, scanning the expanse around him. The extent of the sky reminded him of Iraq. Amanda, he thought. Amanda, he kept repeating. Amanda, he inwardly shouted, the mantra giving him strength.
He saw another camera, this one hidden among rocks. He shot it.
Again, the BlackBerry vibrated in his pocket. But he had something more important to occupy his attention — a gully that stopped him from going farther. It was wide and deep. Water from yesterday’s rain flowed at the bottom. It was a seemingly natural stream bed, but all Balenger could think of was that it couldn’t be avoided. Everything was a possible trap.
LEVEL EIGHT
THE DOOMSDAY VAULT
1
Amanda remained slumped on the ground, staring toward the boulder beyond which Viv lay dead.
“Let’s go,” Ray urged.
“I meant what I said. I can’t do this any longer.”
“No one leaves the game,” the voice warned through her headset.
“Who said anything about leaving?” Weariness muffled Amanda’s voice. “I’m just not playing anymore.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Ray said. “We need to see what’s in the reservoir.”
Amanda looked in that direction, toward the gap in the embankment and the emptiness beyond. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I can’t wait.” Ray walked toward the reservoir.
“Inaction is a form of playing,” the Game Master told Amanda. “It’s a choice not to win. What would Frank say?”
“Frank?” Amanda looked up. The name was a spark to her nervous system. “Leave him out of this! Damn it, what did you do with him? What sick way did you think of to kill him?”
“Leave him out of this? I don’t want to. In fact, I can’t.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Frank’s coming to play.”
The words didn’t make sense. Frank’s coming to play?
A gunshot startled her. It echoed back and forth across the valley, but as much as Amanda could tell, the initiating sound came from beyond the flooded area, from the mountains to the north. A second shot followed. Yes, from the north.
Coming to play?
With difficulty, Amanda stood. She heard another shot. Frank? Is that you? Coming to play? What’s that shooting about? She waited, listening hard, but there wasn’t a fourth shot.
Frank?
She looked toward Ray. Near the ruptured embankment, he, too, had turned, staring across the meager flow of water toward the northern mountains. As the air became still, his lean features toughened. In the harsh sunlight, he resumed climbing the slope toward the emptied reservoir.
Amanda started after him. Her legs ached from crouching to pull at the rocks, but urgency told her that if Game Master wasn’t lying, she needed to do everything possible to help Frank.
She reached the slope and climbed in a zigzag pattern, conserving energy as Viv had taught her. Viv. The shock of her death struck Amanda even harder. Keep moving, Amanda told herself. Get what Viv wanted. Get even.
Near the top, she came to the water bottles that she, Ray, and Viv had filled with melting snow. Their frenzy to breach the dam had made them so thirsty that they drank nearly all the water. A few swallows remained in one bottle. Amanda emptied it into her mouth, the water unpleasantly warm from the sun, and continued on.
She found Ray studying the reservoir’s muddy basin. Despite the force of the escaping flood, some objects remained embedded in the muck. Rotted tree trunks. The remains of a blackboard wagon. The skeleton of a cow. Something that might have once been a rowboat.
The basin was a hundred yards long, ten yards wide at its narrow end, and forty yards wide at the embankment, where she stood. Fish flopped in the puddles. A few snakes followed the meager flow of water across the mud.
“I don’t see any human bones,” Ray said.
“They might be under the mud.”
“But that cow skeleton isn’t. There’s nothing to prove this is where the townspeople disappeared. I don’t see anything that looks like a container, either, if that’s what we’re looking for.”
“Looks forty feet deep. A lot of area. Whatever we’re searching for could be anywhere.” Amanda looked across the mud toward the northern mountains, again wondering what the shots had been about. Frank, are you coming? she wondered, desperately hoping. Then she realized how wrong it was for her to look in that direction. She didn’t want the Game Master to think about Frank. She wanted him to concentrate on how she and Ray played the game.
Ray pulled out his GPS receiver and accessed the coordinates they’d found in the graveyard. The red arrow pointed across the basin. “We need to triangulate. Go along the bank. See where the needle on your receiver points.”
Amanda walked thirty feet and paused, looking at her receiver. The needle aimed beyond the horns of the cow skeleton toward something that protruded a few inches from the mud.
“What is it?” Ray asked.
“Not sure. It looks like it’s metal,” Amanda answered. “A rim of something.”
The object, whatever it was, seemed to be about four feet long by three feet wide.
“Worldly vanities,” Ray said. “That’s what the Sepulcher is supposed to contain. But that doesn’t look like it can hold much.”