The Eye of God (Sigma Force 9)

They reached the gates only slightly ahead of Kowalski.

He huffed and puffed, pointing to Gray, then to Seichan, catching his breath. “Next time . . . don’t be so goddamned late.”

The rest of the strike team prepped to leave, ready to scramble.

And for good reason.

Out across the prison, the headlights of jeeps and armored personnel carriers converged toward them.

“Time to go,” Gray said, staying seated on the bike with Seichan.

One of the Triad members rolled a new motorcycle up to Kowalski and patted his broad shoulder in appreciation.

From here, the plan was for the truck to make a run for Pyongyang, where the vehicle would be ditched and the team would scatter into the city, reaching various prestaged safe houses where new Chinese papers would get them back across the border.

Gray and company would be going a different route on the bikes, away from Pyongyang.

But they wouldn’t be going alone.

Guan-yin limped forward, favoring her right leg. Zhuang had an arm around her waist, his sword in the other.

Seichan tensed upon seeing her mother, but now was not the time for a happy family reunion. A resurgence of gunfire made this plain. Still, daughter and mother shared a glance through the smoke, awkward and uncomfortable, obviously needing time to process it all.

Even before the pair could reach them, a bike was brought before the Triad’s leaders. Zhuang slipped his sword into the sheath across his back and took the front. Guan-yin climbed behind him, never taking her eyes off Seichan.

The remaining members of the strike team gathered back at the truck.

With a final shout, the heavy vehicle trundled through the blasted gates, drawing the three bikes in its wake. Once beyond the prison, the group quickly picked up speed. A quarter mile later, a small river road branched off from the main highway.

Seichan swung the bike onto it, followed by the other two.

As the truck continued on toward Pyongyang, the three motorcycles swept through the marshlands bordering the Taedong River. Lit by bright stars and the blaze of a comet, the river flowed all the way to the Yellow Sea, only thirty miles away.

As they sped along, Gray noted Seichan glancing frequently into the rearview mirror. He knew she was studying her mother, but Seichan never slowed, keeping her bike ahead of the others, as if being chased by a ghost through the marshes.

And maybe she was.

The ghost of her mother . . . an apparition now given flesh and form.

But any reconciliation of past and present must come later.

Gray kept his gaze ahead, knowing what they still faced, and it was no simple task. Though they had escaped the prison . . . they still had to escape North Korea.

12

November 18, 7:22 P.M. QYZT

The Aral Sea, Kazakhstan

“I want to test something,” Jada said.

For the first time, she wondered if this side excursion to this desolate landscape of blowing sand and landlocked rusted ships might be of value. Normally history held little interest for her, especially all this talk of Attila the Hun and the relics of Genghis Khan. But this mention of an ancient cross carved out of meteoric metal—that piqued her interest.

“According to everything you’ve told us,” she said, waving a hand to Father Josip, “the cross is the key to averting a disaster that is supposed to occur on the date inscribed on the skull.”

He nodded, glancing at a faded celestial calendar on the wall. It looked like it might have come from the time of Copernicus, with stylized constellations and astronomical notations.

“Roughly three days from now,” he confirmed.

“Right.” She glanced to Monk. “And we have confirmation from another source that also suggests a disaster on that date. One connected to the comet in the sky.”

Vigor and Rachel turned to Monk, clearly wanting to know what that confirmation was, but he simply crossed his arms.

The monsignor sighed, obviously irked at the secrecy. “Go on,” he encouraged her. “You said you might know how this cross could save the world.”

“Only a conjecture,” she warned. “But first I want to try something.”

She turned to Duncan.

All other eyes swung toward him too. He straightened from a slouch, his expression wary with surprise and confusion. “What?”

“Could you please unwrap the skull and the book?” she asked. “Place them on the table.”

She waited until he had done so, noting the distaste in his pinched lips as he handled the relics.

“You still feel an energy signature emanating from the objects, yes?”

“It’s there.” He rubbed his fingertips on his pants, as if trying to remove the sensation.

She faced the two priests. “If Genghis found this cross in Attila’s tomb, might he have carried it on his person? Kept it as some talisman on his body.”

Vigor shrugged. “After he read Ildiko’s account of its importance, I think that’s highly likely.”

“Genghis would consider it his duty,” Josip agreed, “to protect it during his life.”

“And maybe afterward,” Vigor added, motioning to the skull and book. He eyed her more closely. “Are you suggesting the cross somehow contaminated his bodily tissues, as if it were radioactive?”

“I don’t think it’s radioactive,” she said, though her hands itched to confirm that by examining the skull with the instruments she had left aboard the helicopter. “But I think the cross was giving off some sort of energy that left its trace on his body, altering his tissues perhaps at the quantum level.”

“What sort of energy would do that?” Rachel asked.

“Dark energy,” she said, happy to turn the discourse from history to science. “An energy tied to the birth of our universe. And although it makes up seventy percent of all energy left after the Big Bang, we still don’t know what it is, where it comes from, only that it’s a fundamental property of existence. It explains why the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace versus slowing down.”

Vigor lifted an eyebrow. “And you think the cross carries this energy? What, like a battery?”

“Very crudely put, but yes. Possibly. I can’t know for sure without examining it. But such matters are my field of expertise. My theoretical calculations suggest dark energy is the result of virtual particles annihilating one another in the quantum foam that fills all space and time in the universe.”

She read their blank expressions and simplified it. “It is the very fabric of space-time. Dark energy is the driving force behind quantum mechanics, an energy tied to all the fundamental forces in the universe. Electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear forces, anything that causes an attraction between objects.”