Journey Through the Mirrors (23 page)

“How much time before that window breaks?” Valerie asked.

“Impossible to say,” Chetan replied. “Minutes, maybe.”

Valerie turned and addressed the other technicians who were standing nearby. “All of you need to get out of here and take everyone else in the Cube with you.” She turned to Sylvia. “Sound the evacuation alarm. Everyone needs to vacate this facility right now! Go!”

Sylvia called in the evacuation order, and the technicians scrambled. Within moments, a voice came over the loudspeaker, ordering everyone to evacuate. Only Valerie, Sylvia, and Chetan remained by the Bubble, with Goshi trapped inside.

“How do we kill these things?” Valerie asked.

“Goshi,” Sylvia said, “how were these nanites transported to us?”

Goshi didn’t answer; his face showed fear.

“Goshi!” Valerie yelled. “We need to stay focused here. How were the nanites transported to us?”

“Nitrogen,” he answered, regaining his thoughts. “The samples were maintained in liquid nitrogen capsules.”

“Can we flood the room?” Chetan asked.

“That may stop the nanites,” Sylvia answered, “but Goshi’s bio suit wasn’t made to withstand such a low temperature. It will shatter within seconds.”

“We need another idea!” Valerie said.

Another snap sounded as two more large cracks formed along the outer edges of the window.

Sylvia grabbed Chetan’s arm. “Help me get a few thermal suits. They will be able to withstand the low temps.” The two of them hurried off, leaving Valerie near the Bubble.

“Hold on, Goshi, we’ll figure out something.” Valerie received a call on her PCD. It was Director Sully.

“Did you just order the evacuation of the building? You had better have a good explanation for this, Agent Perrot.”

“I don’t have time to justify anything to you right now,” Valerie shot back. “You can blame me later if you want. But right now, two analysts are dead, and a member of my team is in grave danger because he’s conducting a test you authorized.” Valerie hung up her PCD.

Sylvia and Chetan returned, wearing thermal suits and oxygen tanks strapped to their backs. They had brought back two more for Valerie and Goshi.

“What’s the plan?” Valerie asked.

“We need to get Goshi into one of these suits and then flood the Bubble with liquid nitro,” Sylvia said.

“How are you going to do that without opening the door?” Goshi asked, stepping over the bodies of his fellow agents and moving to a control panel on the wall. He pressed a few buttons. A yellow strobe light began to flash. The inside of the Bubble began to frost up.

“Goshi!” Sylvia yelled. “What are you doing?”

“He’s releasing liquid nitrogen into the Bubble,” Chetan said, looking at a monitor.

“Turn off the nitrogen supply,” Valerie ordered.

“I can’t,” Chetan said. “He jammed the valve.”

Goshi’s muffled voice came over the intercom. “This is the only solution, Val. You can’t take the risk of letting these nanites out of here, and you know it. If only one of them gets out, then a lot more people are going to die.”

Valerie placed her hand on the window. She could barely see Goshi’s face through the ash that had accumulated on his visor.

“It’s all right, Valerie. I once watched Dominic Burke give his life for me. Now it’s time to pass that favor along.” Goshi walked calmly over to his two fallen coworkers and squatted beside them. He gently wiped the dust off their faces. When he was done, he sat in a chair close to where they lay. He undid the latches to the helmet of his bio suit.

“No!” Sylvia shouted. She put her hands over her face and turned away.

Chetan looked on silently. Valerie watched Goshi remove his helmet. He glanced over at the window, which was almost completely coated with frost, then smiled at Valerie and closed his eyes, leaning back in his chair. Valerie could see the puffs of Goshi’s breath in the cold of the room. Frost now, instead of gray dust, began to accumulate on everything in the Bubble. Goshi’s breaths grew smaller, until they ceased entirely. The gray dust that once floated in the Bubble fell innocently to the floor and onto Goshi’s lifeless body.

“We have to find out who did this,” Valerie whispered. “We have to make sure they pay.”

24

Be certain and then become.

—THE CHRONICLES OF SATRAYA

NEW CHICAGO, 2:30 P.M. LOCAL TIME, MARCH 22, 2070

“You’ve had a lot to deal with over the last few days,” Mr. Perrot said to Logan. “The narrow escape in Mexico and Jamie’s injury, your mother’s recordings, Mr. Quinn’s picture, and now the vision of the man in a laboratory.”

“I’m definitely at some kind of nexus point,” Logan said. “It feels sort of similar to when you knocked on my door the morning after the auction and the Council murders.”

After Jamie’s doctor visit, Logan had taken his daughter for a late lunch and then brought her back to the studio with him. While Jamie was delighted to miss the rest of the school day, she was disappointed about missing orchestra practice. She decided to make up for that by practicing her violin at the studio. Jasper was giving a short tour to a group of visitors who had come to see the restored replica of the
Creation of Adam
fresco. Logan hadn’t told anyone that Sebastian Quinn, its previous owner, had informed him that it was actually the original. He thought it prudent not to broadcast that information.

Logan took a tin box off a shelf in the work room and set it on a stainless-steel table. It contained the broken relic that Mr. Montez had hired Logan to restore. Behind them, Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
was on an easel next to a few of Cassandra’s mosaics, which they had brought out of the vault.

“Have you told Valerie about the vision you had last night?” Mr. Perrot asked.

“No,” Logan said. “Just you. Valerie’s dealing with her own issues right now. She called earlier and said there was a big accident at the lab. Three scientists are dead, including a valued member of her team. Plus, she’s under tremendous pressure to figure out what caused the natural gas explosion in northern Africa. Not a good time for her or the WCF.”

“Is she all right?” Mr. Perrot asked, concerned. “That’s the second member of her team she has lost in less than one year.”

“She’s doing fine,” Logan replied, opening the tin box, which contained many smaller containers. “Have you heard from Madu again?”

“No,” Mr. Perrot said. “You can add him to our list of curious developments.”

“Why, after all these years, would he suddenly contact you?”

“I doubt we will know the answer to that question until I speak to Madu again.”

Together Logan and Mr. Perrot removed thirty-eight small containers from the tin box and set them on the table. Logan opened one up. Inside were five small broken pieces of stone packed in protective black molded foam. He set it down and opened another. Mr. Perrot followed suit, and within a few minutes all thirty-eight were open. The stone fragments, which varied in shape and size, had rough edges, and most of them had various hues of pigment on one side—blue, red, yellow, and black. Logan ran his finger across a fragment on which a flower had been painted.

“Reminds me of something I saw in my vision last night,” Logan said. “The scientist I told you about was drawing a cross that looked something like this in his notebook. Except he drew a circle around it. It also vaguely looks like an image we saw painted on the walls of the chamber that Jordan and Jamie fell into in the pyramid. At that time, we thought it was a snowflake. Which doesn’t make sense, now that I think about it, because it doesn’t snow in Mexico.”

Logan looked at the hundreds of pieces in front of him and sighed, wondering where to start. “It’s not going to be easy to put all of this together.”

“When do you have to complete this restoration job?” Mr. Perrot asked.

“Mr. Montez didn’t give me a deadline,” Logan said. “But I suspect that he is under some pressure from the Tripod Group, the think tank that funds his research.”

“Hey, Dad.” A voice suddenly interrupted. It was Jordan.

“How did you get here?” Logan asked.

“I asked Ms. Sally to drop me off when she picked me up at school,” he answered, waving at Mr. Perrot and tossing his green backpack onto the floor. He took a notebook from his backpack and started rifling through its pages enthusiastically. “Dad, did you know that there are pyramids in China? They’re flat-toppers just like the ones we saw in Mexico. There are hundreds of them around the world.”

“Jordan is writing a report on pyramids for a school project,” Logan explained to Mr. Perrot.

“Well, seeing as you are somewhat of an expert on pyramids,” Mr. Perrot said, “perhaps you’d like to assist your father and me in putting these pieces back together.”

Jordan’s face lit up as he took the fragment that Logan was holding. “This looks like the snowflake we saw in the mural in the secret chamber.”

“That’s what I thought,” Logan said. “Mr. Montez said these fragments
were found in a tunnel they discovered in the Pyramid of the Moon several months ago.”

Jordan reached into his backpack and pulled out his PCD. “I have an idea. Let’s use the Puzzler!”

“The what?” asked Logan.

Jordan projected a cube-shaped grid over the table with his PCD. “It’s a puzzle solver,” he said. “My friend Zack showed it to me at school.” He took one of the pieces from the box and set it near his PCD. He then pressed a button, which caused a red laser to scan the surface of the stone fragment. Within moments, its 3-D image was projected within the grid. He reached into the projected grid and, with various hand gestures, was able to rotate and size the image as he desired. “We need to scan all the pieces, and the Puzzler will help us put them together.”

“Can’t hurt to try,” Logan said. They moved the pieces into the projected grid and then at Logan’s suggestion, separated them by color according to the painted sides. After an hour, they were able to make out the figure of a man and what appeared to be flowers. It took some time, but with determination and assistance from Jordan’s PCD, the artifact was taking shape.

“It looks like the last piece goes here,” Jordan said, using his finger to slide the projected piece into place. The 3-D image was now complete, revealing a thirty-centimeter-tall cylindrical object, which had an almost eight-centimeter-long stem jutting from its side. It was intricately painted and depicted a man standing under a blue sky, with flower-shaped objects floating around him.

“What is it?” Mr. Perrot asked.

“It’s a whistling vessel,” Logan answered. “There were a bunch of them in the secret chamber.” He had a quizzical look on his face. “Not to take anything away from the Puzzler, but it seems to me that Mr. Montez could have pieced this together himself. Why did he need me to do it?”

No one had an explanation to offer.

Jordan examined the vessel. “This one’s much bigger than the ones we saw,” he said. “And it’s shaped differently, too. The others were more rounded; this one is cylindrical, like a fat tube. The man painted on the vessel looks like one of the priests that were painted on the wall. And those are the same snowflakes we saw.”

Mr. Perrot squinted and maneuvered to get a closer look at something. “Are those the Satraya symbols?”

“Where?” Logan asked.

Mr. Perrot pointed at the head of the man depicted on the vessel. “Jordan, can you zoom in on the man’s head?”

Jordan did so, and Logan nodded at what they saw. “The fundamental four, along with the main Satraya symbol, all of which also appear on the headband of the praying man statue.”

“Praying man?” Mr. Perrot asked.

“Mr. Montez showed us a statue that he found near these fragments. Valerie said that it looked like a man on his knees praying. I think Mr. Montez is going to be disappointed. He suspected that these fragments were going to help him figure out some kind of radiation source.” Logan turned to Mr. Perrot, who was deep in thought. “What is it?”

“Why would a person who was familiar with these symbols two thousand years ago sculpt a man who was praying?” Mr. Perrot said. “If the sculptor possessed that kind of knowledge, wouldn’t he have depicted something else?”

“It looks like something is written on the stem of the whistle,” Jordan said. He zoomed to the spot he was referring to, but the words were incomprehensible:
QUITETEUHQUIMILOA CANAHUAC COHUATL TOCONMONEXTILIZ ITOZQUI TLALLI.

“What does it mean?” Jordan asked.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Perrot said. “I’m not even sure what language it is.”

“Valerie and I saw words from this language carved in the base of the praying man statue. Mr. Montez said it was a form of Nahuatl.
Let’s see if we can get a translation.” Logan pulled out his PCD and started typing, waiting a moment for the results. “There are a few different interpretations, but they all seem to allude to the same thing: ‘Wrap thin serpent to discover earth voice.’ ”

“Remember that image of a snake we found on the platform?” Jordan said. “The one with the red eye? Maybe this has something to do with that. Not sure what
earth voice
means, though.”