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Long Island, New York
Professor accelerated, shooting straight across three lanes of oncoming traffic, before hooking left and joining the flow of traffic heading the other direction. The car fishtailed back and forth, confounding his efforts to regain control.
“Look out,” Jimmy warned, pointing a finger at a gray van directly ahead and coming up fast.
Professor swerved over into the inside lane, almost sideswiping the van, and then they were past.
Ahead, the red sports car he was pursuing took a hard-right turn.
“Turn right,” Jimmy cried. “Stay with him!”
“I know,” Professor snapped, and then muttered under his breath. “This is impossible.”
He steered hard, realizing only as the front end swung around that the turn wasn’t merely a hard right—it was a hairpin, curving almost completely around to ascend up the hillside that ran parallel to the highway. Even so, Professor mistimed the turn. The front end bounced up onto the sidewalk, narrowly missing a group of people who were standing on the corner, evidently waiting for a bus. Suddenly, the hillside was right in front of him. He tried to simultaneously brake and cut to the right, but failed to do either one. The car slammed into the hill, ejecting him into the air like a rag doll, tumbling in slow motion.
The wall-mounted 120-inch plasma screen went gray, the image frozen, and then a single word appeared slashed across its middle. “Wasted.”
Jimmy sat back laughing. “Oh, dude. That was epic.”
Professor resisted the urge to hurl the wireless computer-game controller against the wall. “I don’t know why I let you talk me into this.”
“Right, because there are so many other things we could be doing right now,” Jimmy countered, still chuckling.
Professor sighed resignedly and settled back to wait for his character to respawn. Jimmy wasn’t wrong. With the Prometheus situation still unresolved, Jimmy didn’t dare venture out into the world, much less return to his life, and until Tam Broderick said otherwise, babysitting Jimmy was his top priority, which meant he wasn’t going anywhere either.
There were far worse places to spend a week. Christian Garral’s home was, by most definitions, a mansion, which meant there was plenty to keep them occupied. Garral himself was both hospitable and garrulous, which meant plenty of good food and drink, and even better conversation. Still, after a few days, Professor felt he had exhausted the list of intellectual diversions, which was why he had decided to join Jimmy in the game room. The journalist had hardly left the room during the course of their stay. Evidently, Garral’s Alienware computer provided a transcendent gaming experience. For his part, Professor was astonished at the cinematic quality of the games, many of which had storylines as complex as some novels, with gameplay that required lightning reflexes and eye-hand coordination. After a few hours of watching as a spectator, Jimmy had offered him a turn.
It had been a long time since he had felt so completely inept. Learning to use the controls was like learning how to type in a foreign language or play an unfamiliar musical instrument. The in-game tutorial had helped. A little. But now he was on his own and failing spectacularly at tasks that, in real life, he could have accomplished with ease. The worst part was, he felt compelled to keep playing.
A gentle knock on the game room door distracted him. He looked up to see Garral enter the room, phone in hand. “Excuse the interruption gentleman, but I think you’ll want to join me for this call.”
He placed the phone on the coffee table in front of the couch where Professor and Jimmy sat. “You’re on speaker, Mr. Maddock.”
“Dane?” Jimmy sat up. So did Professor.
There was a brief lag and then Maddock’s voice issued from the device. “Hey, Jimmy. Professor, you’re there, too?”
“I am, Dane.”
“Great. I think we’re going to need all hands on deck for this one.” Maddock then launched into a narrative describing everything that had happened subsequent to their discovery of the plane wreck.
Professor was astonished to learn that Jade and Kismet had gotten embroiled in the adventure. While he had been babysitting Jimmy, they, along with Dane and Bones, had traveled to the literal ends of the earth, facing danger and making incredible discoveries. He was also surprisingly relieved to hear that Jade had come through it all without serious injury. Looking out for her was, after all, still his primary responsibility.
But as Maddock related the events that had just transpired in Egypt, he realized that Jade’s continued safety was far from guaranteed. Prometheus—or rather, Ulrich Hauser, the apparent leader of the radical faction—was close to unlocking some kind of supernatural power that would fundamentally change the shape of the world, and Jade, along with Maddock and Bones, were intent on stopping them.
Even if it cost them their lives.
“We know that Hauser is going after the fourth elemental relic,” Maddock concluded, “And it sounds like Prometheus has it. We’ve got to beat him to it. Unfortunately, we don’t have a clue about its location.”
Garral’s already grave frown deepened. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have that information. The location of the vault is a secret known only by a handful of Prometheus’ leaders. And their identities are secret as well.”
“You know someone though,” Professor put in. “You’ve got an inside source.”
Garral nodded slowly, clearly conflicted at the position he had been put in. “Yes. If anyone would know, she would. And since this concerns Nick, I believe she will help.”
“She?” asked Maddock. “You’re talking about Nick’s mom, aren’t you?”
Garral’s chagrined look was answer enough. “Unfortunately, making contact with her is equally problematic. She’s always been the one to initiate our conversations.”
“How do you usually communicate?” asked Jimmy.
“Mostly burner phones, delivered by couriers. Sometimes SMS chat, but she always uses a throwaway account.”
Jimmy’s eyes narrowed in concentration. “If you’d be willing to let me poke around in your files, I might be able to get a line on her.”
Garral nodded. Jimmy immediately picked up the wireless keyboard, closed out the video game, and went to work.
“That sounds like it’s going to take some time,” intoned Maddock. “And we don’t have a lot of that to spare right now. Hauser’s already on the move.”
“I can definitely help with that,” Jimmy replied. “He’ll probably fly out. Private jet or chartered flight, right? He’ll have to file a flight plan.”
“I’m sure he’ll cover his tracks,” Professor countered.
“I’m sure he will, too. But I’ve got mad skills.” Jimmy entered a few keystrokes, and a new window opened on the plasma screen. Under a blue header which bore the logo of the International Civil Aviation Organization, a table displayed all the flights departing Alexandria, Egypt.
“He also doesn’t know that we made it out of that tomb,” Maddock added. “He might not be as careful as he ordinarily would. My guess is, he’s got just one thing on his mind. He’ll probably go straight to wherever it is he’s going.”
Jimmy just nodded absently and continued navigating the site, changing back and forth between screens faster than Professor could follow, and after a few seconds he stopped trying. “Dane, you should probably head for Cairo immediately. From there, you’ll have a lot more travel options, and hopefully by the time you get there, we’ll have a better idea of where they’re headed.”
“Beat you to it,” Jimmy announced before Maddock could reply. “I know where they’re going.”
Professor glanced up at the screen and saw displayed the information for a charter flight that was scheduled to depart Alexandria in a matter of minutes. He blinked. “How do you know it’s that one?”
“Well, for starters, the flight plan was just amended thirty minutes ago. The original destination was Paris, but now there’s an addendum. Longyearben, Norway. My backtrace on the hacker that locked me out of my proxy network ended at the SvalSat facility just outside Longyearben. At the time, I thought they had outsmarted me. Roped me down a rabbit hole, but I think maybe I outsmarted myself.”
Maddock’s voice sounded after the requisite delay. “But that could just be a coincidence, right? We can’t afford to run down that rabbit hole after you.”
“Sure, it’s possible. But Longyearben is remote. It’s not the kind of place you just decide to visit on a whim.”
A new and familiar voice issued from the speaker—“Bones” Bonebrake. “When you say ‘remote’...?”
“Longyearben is in the Svalbard Archipelago,” Professor supplied. “It’s north of the Arctic Circle, the closest city to the North Pole.”
“Svalbard,” Maddock said. “Isn’t that where the Doomsday Vault is?”
“The technical name for it is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, but yes, it’s a man-made cave carved into a mountain, containing frozen samples of diverse flora, against the possibility of a catastrophic event.”
“You’re shitting me,” Bones said with a groan. “Another frozen wasteland? Why can’t they ever put these things somewhere nice? Like Maui?”
“The surrounding permafrost helps keep the vault at a constant temperature of zero degrees Fahrenheit.” He paused a beat, then added. “The Seed Vault would be the perfect cover for a Prometheus treasure vault. I think Jimmy’s right. That’s where they’re going.”
“Then that’s where we have to go,” Maddock said. “Mr. Garral, I hate to ask but—”
Garral cut him off. “You don’t need to. There will be a jet waiting for you in Cairo. And I’ll be waiting for you in Oslo.”
“We all will,” Professor said. He glanced at Garral and got a nod of confirmation.
After ending the call, Garral gave a heavy sigh. “People talk about being willing to go to the ends of the earth for their children. It seems I’ll be doing that quite literally.”
Professor had no doubt that Garral was capable of enduring whatever hardships lay ahead, and Kismet was his son, after all.
Jimmy cleared his throat. “Umm, I need some clarification on something. When you said we would all be there—?”
“I meant all of us. You heard Dane. All hands on deck.”
“I think I’d be a lot more use to everyone if I stayed right here.”
Professor fixed Jimmy with a hard stare. “The Svalbard Seed Vault is one of the most secure facilities on earth. If anyone can beat their security system, it’s you.”
“I can walk you through remotely—”
Professor shook his head. “That’s not going to cut it. We’ll need your expertise on the ground.”
Jimmy blanched.
“This shouldn’t be hard for you,” Professor went on. “I’ve seen you in action. You walked into the NSA, for God’s sake. Just think of it as a real-life video game.”
“A video game where I could get killed.”
Professor gripped the other man’s shoulder. “Jimmy, do you remember ringing the bell?”
For a moment, Jimmy appeared confused by the non-sequitur, but then his expression tightened and he jerked away from Professor. “How dare you—”
“For a long time, I thought of you as just another quitter. Big dreams and a little heart. But I was wrong about you. You just had a bad day.”
Jimmy glowered at him for several seconds, then spoke through clenched teeth. “You gotta point, coach?”
“You promised Dane that you and he would finish BUD/S together. You remember that?”
“I’ve done more for Maddock than you can possibly imagine.”
“This isn’t about Maddock. It’s about you. Finishing what you started. Proving it to yourself.”
Jimmy’s eyes danced. He glanced over at Garral, who looked on in stony silence, and then back to Professor. “You can’t make me go, you know.”
“Actually, I could.” He paused a beat, letting that sink in, then added. “But I’m not going to because you’re not going to ring the bell this time.”
He didn’t give Jimmy a chance to respond but turned to Garral. “We’d better get moving.”