The Devil's Triangle (A Brit in the FBI 4)

Ten minutes later, Cassandra sat at her cypress desk, shining with the rubbed-in oil the housekeepers used that smelled of sweet oranges. It was her private office, her own sanctuary, restored by her with warm woods and very old medieval tapestries she loved.

She’d placed the cherubim’s wing in the center of her desk. She would prove its provenance, but for her and Ajax, not the archaeological community. No one would ever know of this amazing find in the Gobi.

She studied it as she was certain her mother had, and touched it lovingly, awestruck. She imagined if she looked at it closely enough, the wing would allow her to see visions of her mother.

But she had work to do. She wanted to see the new track of the storm her grandfather was moving from Bermuda into the Caribbean.

She pressed a button on the underside of her desk and a large paper-thin screen rose from the surface. It took up almost the entire width of the polished cypress and was oddly translucent, enabling her to see someone should they come into the room, but they wouldn’t be able to see what was on the screen. Grandfather had designed it, making it similar to a Teleprompter, with a beam-splitting mirror that gave the impression the images and words on the screen were floating in midair. The screen was divided into four quadrants, two for Cassandra’s work with the foundation, the others tied directly to her grandfather’s control center in the Caribbean, so she could monitor the weather he was creating in real time. She could see the storms in play and could also see the status of the satellites.

As she watched the satellites spin, she marveled at the power of the technology their grandfather had created. All based on a weather machine developed early in the last century by Nikola Tesla and Appleton Kohath, using an early application of Tesla’s famous Coil. She’d read in the family letters that when Appleton had shown Tesla the papers and drawings Da Vinci had made of a weather machine, La Macchina, Tesla had exploded with ideas, and together they’d tried a number of approaches to creating a working model, and they’d known success, of a sort.

Their first method was to send a large, unregulated weather balloon into the air to spray out a crystal cloud accelerant they had heated in a powerful electric field. They were able to create a spectrum of weather events, often by enhancing the processes that would naturally occur in nature. But they couldn’t control the results to the degree Appleton wanted.

But now, with his satellites and lasers in place, her grandfather could energize the atmosphere more precisely, and with pinpoint accuracy create a windstorm or thunderstorm, depending on conditions in a fifty-mile prearranged radius. Cassandra knew his genius was the only reason they’d been able to refine their ideas using the newer technology. He’d tried to explain it to her, and she did understand some of it. She knew building storms involved creating a massive electric charge in midair by focusing the laser beams of three satellites into the lower atmosphere, and this caused a chain reaction among the charged particles, ending in a massive discharge, like a great ball of lightning, a sort of firestorm in the sky. She believed that somehow, the swirling pattern of combustion Grandfather created caused a massive downdraft of air, and updrafts all around it. If there was moisture in the air, massive clouds quickly formed. If not, the wind itself would rip up the ground below. Over water, the growing disturbance quickly spun into a powerful hurricane.

She’d seen it happen, watched a small cloud form in a pure blue sky, almost in the blink of an eye, with a center like a blinding golden ball with lobes that would start to spin in the clouds formed around it. Then it would spin upward, like a rising tornado, the fiercely glowing firestorm still inside it, and the massive winds would follow. The storm would move in the winds it created and make landfall as a controlled and intense weather event. It was fascinating to watch. Ajax understood enough, and soon now, he would take Grandfather’s place, and they would have the control, make the important decisions, not Grandfather.

It was amazing, really. Over the years, Grandfather had gotten more and more precise, and the Genesis Group coffers were kept full on the backs of the localized disasters, buying and shorting stocks of the insurance, construction, and supply companies most affected, sometimes buying and selling them wholesale. Their spiderweb of finances was run out of Singapore by a brilliant analyst, Landry Rodgers, a Brit, whose soul had been suitably corrupted years before. Landry was a man as skilled at manipulating investments as Grandfather was at controlling barometric pressure.

Appleton and Nikola Tesla would have been proud. Their concept—Da Vinci’s concept—had been perfected in fewer than one hundred years.

She sat back in her chair and watched the screens. Suddenly, a spear of sun caught the golden edge of the cherubim’s wing, making it shimmer. She reached out a finger and traced the long line of the wing’s edge. What she and Ajax had believed were grooves carved in the gold to create the illusion of feathers, were now more visible in the bright light. Not grooves—there were glyphs carved into the gold.

She pulled a magnifying sheet out of her drawer and looked more closely. The markings weren’t unfamiliar to her, but she couldn’t read them. Had they been made in the beginning, when the Ark was built, or were they a more recent addition?

She looked up to see Ajax come into her office.

“What are you doing?”

She gestured toward the phone. “I need you. Come here and look. There are some markings on the edge of the wing, runes or glyphs, I can’t tell which. Nor can I tell when they were made.”

She handed him the magnifying sheet, and he bent low over the wing fragment. He looked up, his eyes shining as bright as the cherubim’s wing.

“They look like Cuneiform, and that predates Moses by a few thousand years.”

“Shouldn’t markings from his era be in Hebrew?”

“That would be the most logical language, yes. Give me a sheet of paper and a pencil. Let me see if I can decipher this.”

She did, and he bent his head over the gold, scribbling on the paper. “It will take me some time to translate. But a few I can pick out—Oh, I’m wrong. It’s Phoenician. Makes more sense, and makes things easier. See, here’s the glyph for door, and here’s . . .” He stopped.

“What? What is it?”

“Weapon.”

Cassandra stared.

He scribbled for a few more minutes, then met his twin’s eyes. “It’s a warning. It reads: Through this door lies a weapon of great power. Open it, and it will indeed kill.”

“What does that mean?”

“Something to do with the power of the Ark, surely a warning to those who aren’t Levites or Kohaths, so it doesn’t apply to us. Still, it doesn’t get us any closer to finding the Ark itself. Unless”—he paused, studied the cherubim’s wing—“unless the wing will somehow guide us to the rest of the Ark.”

“As in divine magic of some sort? As in it gave you warmth and I heard its buzzing? You really think it could search out the rest of the cherubim itself?”

He shrugged. “Who knows? I came to tell you I’ve instructed the crew to start a fresh dig in the southeast quadrant. It’s one of the few spots we haven’t searched extensively.”

“Good idea. But first things first. We must alert Grandfather.” She picked up the encrypted satellite phone and started the detailed process of calling the Genesis Group’s true headquarters in the Caribbean. Before she could finish dialing, there was a knock at her office door.