THIRTY

 

With Fiona using the golems to block the creatures instead of destroying them, they reached the monastery walls without triggering any further radiant bursts. The gunmen were also absent, but Pierce remained wary as they made their way around the monastery. The garden area on the opposite side of the complex had been transformed into a triage site, with emergency workers and monks ministering to the wounded.

“I hope Father Justin made it,” Fiona said.

Pierce nodded. “Right now, the best thing we can do for him and all the survivors is to get as far away from here as we can.”

“How far is that?” Gallo asked.

“We’ll just keep moving,” Pierce said.

They slipped past the casualty collection point and made their way down the road to the tourist village, also named for Saint Catherine. The hotels were full of visitors who, following both the earthquakes and the rumors of a terrorist attack at the nearby monastery, were waiting to be evacuated by bus to Sharm el-Sheikh. After a few inquiries, Pierce found a local taxi driver willing to make the road trip, for quadruple the normal fare—a very competitive rate given the circumstances, he was assured—and they were soon underway again.

As the hired car raced down the desert roads, Pierce called Dourado and learned of the debacle in Geneva, and the worldwide consequences.

There had indeed been another spate of earthquakes in the western hemisphere. In an ironic reversal, earthquake-prone California had experienced only mild shocks, nothing above magnitude 5.0. But further to the north, the pent-up energy of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, had been released in a massive six-minute-long quake measuring 8.4 on the Richter scale. The entire northwest coast of Oregon and Washington had gone silent. The predictions emerging from scientists and news agencies were ominous. Portland, Seattle, and everything west of Interstate 5 had been devastated by the temblor and the subsequent tsunami. Alaska had been hit with the most destructive temblor since the 1964 Good Friday earthquake that had leveled Anchorage. Hawaii and Japan were bracing for tsunamis that would, in all likelihood, dwarf the disastrous effects of the 2011 Fukushima quake.

That the seismic disturbances had been a long time coming—historically, a ‘Big One’ hit the region every 300-600 years, and the last one had occurred in 1700—didn’t make the news any easier to swallow. Carter was a Seattle native, and Fiona’s ancestral home was just a few miles inland on the Oregon Coast. It would be hours, possibly even days, before the true extent of the damage was known. But even the most optimistic predictions were dire.

Yet as terrible as the news was, Pierce knew it was only a shadow of the danger that still loomed on the horizon.

Following the showdown with the renegade robots, the team had regrouped and set up an ad hoc command center at Tomorrowland. Despite his frustration, Pierce knew that the misguided attempt to ‘fix’ the Black Knight had been the right decision, given the circumstances. At least now they knew who was responsible for the global threat.

Ishiro Tanaka.

Pierce put the phone on speaker mode, as Dourado began relating what she had discovered about the Japanese physicist.

The grandson of a survivor of the Nagasaki atomic bombing, Tanaka had, from an early age, shown a macabre fascination with the destructive forces at work in the universe. Later in life, as a university student, he had become an active and vocal proponent of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement—VHEMT, pronounced ‘Vehement’. They were a group that espoused the belief that humans were a virulent disease and would destroy all life on Earth if they were not themselves made extinct. It was a goal they believed could be accomplished peacefully through anti-natalism—the end of human procreation.

“Vehement wasn’t radical enough for him,” Dourado explained, “But he became friends with an Indian student named Bandar Pradesh—”

“Bandar Pradesh?” Gallo broke in. “That’s not a real Indian name.”

“I know, right? Bandar literally means ‘port’ and Pradesh means ‘province.’ It’s probably an alias or some kind of inside joke. He preferred to go by his hacker name: Shiva. Pradesh or Shiva or whatever you want to call him, took the whole humans-are-a-disease thing one step further. He believed that all life—from microbes to redwood trees to blue whales—was a great big cosmic mistake.”

“Huh?”

Carter broke in. “It’s the philosophy of pessimism.”

“Like Rust, in True Detective,” Dourado supplied.

“I was thinking more along the lines of Schopenhauer,” Carter said. “Death gets us all in the end. Everything we do only leads to suffering, either for ourselves or someone else. Entropy will eventually destroy the universe no matter what we do, and since life is pretty much miserable for most creatures, eradicating life from the universe is a merciful act, sparing future generations from pain and suffering.”

“That’s dark,” Pierce said.

“Geniuses are a little more susceptible to philosophies like that, because they want to understand the big picture and think everything should make sense like a balanced equation. They end up getting scared by what they see.”

“Tanaka and Shiva stayed friends,” Dourado continued. “And continued to be pessi-bros or whatever. Tanaka worked at HAARP for a while, and then joined Pradesh at a place called Jovian Technologies, but then Shiva disappeared during the Blackout incident in Paris a few years ago.”

“I remember that,” Fiona said with a groan.

“Tanaka was pretty quiet after that,” Dourado continued, “Stopped posting on the Vehement forums and focused on his work.”

“Unfortunately,” said a new, unfamiliar male voice, “his work was helping me figure out how to turn the Black Knight satellite into a planetary-scale solar reflector.”

Marcus Fallon, Pierce thought. The boy who couldn’t resist playing with fire.

“So that’s all he wants? Global annihilation? No negotiation?”

“Seems that way,” Dourado answered.

“Do we know where he’s going?”

“Not a clue. He could be anywhere. All he needs is an antenna array with a 10 gigahertz transmitter, and he can stop the sun.”

“What about the men who attacked the monastery? Were they working with him?”

“Given the timing of the attack, I think that’s a safe assumption. Tanaka has been building his doomsday network for a long time, and thanks to the Internet and his Vehement connections, it’s worldwide.”

Gallo shook her head. “Who knew there were so many people out there rooting for the end of the world?”

“There are a lot of them, and they don’t care if they live or die.”

“Well, they’re all going to be disappointed when we shut down the Black Knight. Permanently.”

Dourado let out a cheer and in a gruff voice said, “Today, we are canceling the apocalypse!”

Carter was a little more subdued. “You found the sun chariot?”

“Not exactly.” He recounted their misadventure with the shekinah creatures and the revelation in the Cave of Moses. Dourado interrupted only once with the cryptic pronouncement, “So there is a cow level.”

Pierce assumed it was a pop culture reference. Dourado made a lot of those.

“The Ark of the Covenant,” Fallon mused. “It’s a real thing?”

For the first time since making the call, it occurred to Pierce that he was being a little too free with information. “That’s right,” he said.

“And it’s an artifact from the same aliens that made the Black Knight?”

Fallon was quick, and well-informed. He also knew more about the meta-material than any of them. Okay, Pierce thought. Time to extend a little trust. I just hope this doesn’t come back to bite me in the ass.

“Tanaka has the Roswell fragment, and I think we know what he plans to do with it. Unfortunately, since we don’t know where he’s going to do it from, finding the Ark and using it to shut down the Black Knight is our best option.”

“We don’t have much time,” Fallon pointed out. “Do you know where it is? In the movie, it was in Egypt. But then they took it to Area 51. Is that where it is?”

“No. Though it pains me to say, that was just a movie. And the premise was flawed. According to the movie, the Pharaoh Shishak—or Shoshenq—took the Ark when he raided the Temple of Solomon in 980 B.C.E. The raid actually happened, but Shoshenq didn’t get the Ark. It’s mentioned again in the Bible record during the reign of King Josiah more than three hundred years later.”

Carter spoke up again. “The Ark is in Ethiopia. In a chapel in Axum.”

Pierce smiled to himself. “That’s one of many rumored locations. There are so many different Ark stories, it’s no wonder it’s never been found. The Ethiopian legend is based on a Bible reference about the Queen of Sheba visiting King Solomon. Two thousand-odd years later, the Christian emperor of Ethiopia built on that story to legitimize his right to rule. According to this new version, Sheba was another name for Ethiopia. Solomon secretly married the Queen and she bore him a son, Menelik, the first emperor and progenitor of the Menelik dynasty, which supposedly endured until 1975. Solomon entrusted the Ark to Menelik, who bore it away secretly to Sheba, where it has been ever since.” He shook his head. “It’s a pretty fanciful story, concocted for political reasons.

“For my money, the most plausible story is recorded in the Second Book of Maccabees. Shortly before the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and carried all the Jews off into exile, the prophet Jeremiah was ordered by God to take the Ark and the Tabernacle and hide them in a cave on Mount Nebo, the place where Moses died. He shut the cave up and never told anyone its location, promising that it would only be revealed when God gathered his people together again and showed them mercy.

“Jeremiah was the son of a Kohen, a Levite priest descended from Moses’s brother Aaron, and incidentally the derivation of the modern Jewish name Cohen. The Bible account is very explicit about the fact that only a Kohen could safely enter the Holy of Holies in the Tabernacle and approach the Ark. To me, that weighs in favor of Jeremiah being the one to relocate the Ark.”

When no one raised an objection, Pierce went on. “Mount Nebo is in modern-day Jordan, but there’s some disagreement about whether that identification is accurate. Judging by the fact that nobody’s found the Ark in the last twenty-six-hundred years, I’m guessing it’s not.

“Cintia, head back to Rome and start digging in the archives. See if you can give us a better search area. We’ll head on to Amman and get in position.”

“What about me and Erik?” Carter asked.

“Do what you can to help Cintia.”

“I’ll meet you there,” Lazarus said, speaking for the first time. “I should have been there with you.”

“From what Cintia’s told me,” Pierce countered, “It’s a good thing you weren’t.”

“All the same, I’m no use to anyone staying in the rear with the gear.”

Pierce weighed the offer a moment. As much as he would have liked to have the big man with him, looking out for them, there really wasn’t a need for additional protection. With Tanaka’s deception exposed, the security leak that had led the gunmen to them in Sinai was plugged. Besides, Tanaka would almost certainly shift his resources to the matter of finding another transmitter and guarding it. Finding the Ark was going to require actual archaeology—solving an age old mystery and digging in the ground—not the brawling, gun-toting, tomb-raiding of an Indiana Jones.

“I appreciate it,” Pierce said, “But I’m hoping we’ll have this wrapped up in a few hours. Stay with Felice.”

Lazarus didn’t press the issue, and it occurred to Pierce that his last statement might have been misinterpreted. He had meant to imply that Carter might be in need of comfort in the wake of the devastating news out of the Northwest, but perhaps the big man had understood it to mean something else.

Stay with Felice so that you’ll be together when the end comes.

If he failed to find the Ark, to solve a mystery that had confounded searchers for more than two thousand years, it just might come to that.

“You know, on second thought, if the Ark isn’t at Mount Nebo, we’re going to be back to square one. We need to cover our bases. Erik, you and Felice head to Ethiopia and check out the church in Axum. If we both strike out, at least we’ll have crossed two possibilities off the list.”

He tried to sound upbeat when giving them the assignment. It was busy-work, giving them something to do so they wouldn’t feel useless. The odds of the Ark being in Ethiopia were about a billion-to-one. However, as he had once pointed out to a certain cheerleader who had given him similar odds of ever going out with him, a billion-to-one meant there was still a chance.

“On it,” Lazarus said.

“What about me?” Fallon asked. “What can I do?”

Pierce resisted the impulse to tell Fallon that he had done quite enough. He settled for something only slightly more diplomatic. “We’ve got this under control, and I’m sure you’ve got some house cleaning to do. If the world doesn’t end, you’ll know we succeeded.”