SANDSTORM sf-1 Page 6

  Bending down, he retrieved his knife from the floor. “Stay here,” he said softly in Mandarin. He rushed to the main room and used the dagger to pry off the ventilation grille. It snapped open with a pop of screws. He reached within and grabbed the black device hidden inside. The EM grenade was roughly the size and shape of a football.

  Palming the device, he fled to the suite’s door and out into the hall. Still without his shoes, he sprinted down the carpeted hall. He analyzed a quick schematic in his head, coordinating where the north exit was in relation to his location on this floor. He did a best-guess estimate.

  Eight doors down he stopped and pulled out his security key again. He swiped it through the electronic lock and shoved the door open as soon as it flashed green. “Security!” he hollered, and raced into the room.

  An older woman, the same one he had spotted earlier, sat in a chair reading USA Today. She tossed the paper in the air and clutched her robe to her throat. “Was ist los?” she asked in German.

  He hurried past her to the window, reassuring her that nothing was wrong. “Nichts, sich ungefдhr zu sorgen, fraulein,” he answered.

  He slid the window open. Again it was only enough to stick his head through. He glanced down.

  The Lincoln Town Car idled below. The rear door to the sedan slammed shut. Shots rang out. Slugs pelted the side of the car as its tires squealed and smoked, but the car had been bulletproofed, an American-built tank.

  Painter leaned back and shoved the football-shaped device out the window. He depressed the activation button and threw the grenade straight down with all the force in his shoulder, hoping for a Hail Mary pass.

  He pulled his arm back inside. The wheels of the Town Car stopped squealing as it gained traction. He sent a prayer to the spirits of his ancestors. The EM pulse range was only twenty yards. He held his breath. What was that old saying? Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.

  As he held his breath, the muffled whump of the grenade finally sounded. Had he been close enough?

  He leaned his head back outside.

  The Town Car reached the near corner of the tower, but rather than making the turn, it swerved uncontrollably and struck a row of parked cars head-on. The front of the Lincoln climbed up the hood of a Volkswagen Passat and came to a crooked rest.

  He sighed.

  That was the good thing about EM pulses. They didn’t discriminate about what computer systems they fried. Even those that operated a Lincoln Town Car.

  Below, uniformed security personnel poured from the exit and quickly surrounded the disabled car.

  “Was ist los?” the old German woman repeated behind him.

  He turned and hurried across the room. “Etwas Abfall gerade entleeren.” Just dumping some garbage. He crossed quickly down the hall to the elevator lobby. Retrieving his shoes from the jammed elevator door, he hit the button for the main floor.

  His stunt had stopped Zhang’s escape, but it had also surely wiped out the computer he carried, destroying the research data. But that was not Painter’s main concern.

  Cassandra.

  He had to get to her.

  As soon as the doors opened, he rushed across the gambling floor, where pandemonium reigned. The firefight had not gone unnoticed, though a few people still sat calmly in front of their slot machines, pushing their buttons with dogged determination.

  He crossed to the north exit and had to run through a series of blockades, flashing his identification, frustrated at being held back. Finally he spotted John Fenton, head of security, and called out to him. He ushered Painter through the shattered exit. Safety glass crunched underfoot and the telltale taint of gunpowder hung in the air.

  “I don’t understand why the car crashed,” Fenton said. “Lucky for us, though.”

  “Not just luck,” Painter said, and explained about the EM pulse and its twenty-yard range. “A few guests are going to have a hard time starting their cars this morning. And there’ll probably be a few fried televisions on the first floors.”

  Outside, Painter saw that the local security had things in hand. Additionally, a row of charcoal gray police cars, lights flashing, wound through the parking lot, circling down upon the site. The MP Tribal Police.

  Painter searched the area. Zhang’s bodyguards were down on their knees, fingers laced behind their heads. Two bodies were sprawled on the ground, security coats draped over their faces. They were both men. Painter crossed to them and peeled one suit back. Another bodyguard, half his face gone. He didn’t have to check the other. He recognized Zhang’s polished leather shoes.

  “He shot himself,” a familiar voice said from amid a group of security men and a pair of EMTs. “Rather than be captured.”

  Painter turned and saw Cassandra step forward. Her face was pale, her smile shy. She was only in her bra. Her left shoulder was lost in a bandage.

  She nodded to a black suitcase a few feet away. Zhang’s computer.

  “So we lost the data,” he said. “The EM pulse wiped it.”

  “Maybe not,” she said with a grin. “The case is shielded with a copper Faraday cage. It should’ve been insulated from the pulse.”

  He sighed with relief. So the data was safe. All was not lost…that is, if they could retrieve the pass code. He stepped toward Cassandra. She grinned at him, eyes still shining. He pulled his Glock and pressed it to her forehead.

  “Painter, what are you-” She stepped back.

  He followed, never letting his gun drop. “What’s the code?”

  Fenton moved to one side. “Commander?”

  “Stay out of it.” He cut the security chief off and maintained his attention on Sanchez. “Four bodyguards and Zhang. Everyone is accounted for here. If Zhang was onto our surveillance, then there was a good chance he alerted his contact at the conference. They would have fled together in order to complete the exchange.”

  She tried to glance to the bodies, but he restrained her with his gun. “You can’t think it was me?” she said, with a half laugh.

  He pointed his free hand, never letting his weapon drop. “I recognize the handiwork of a forty-five, like the Sig Sauer you carry.”

  “Zhang took it from me. Painter, you’re being paranoid. I-”

  He reached to a pocket and pulled out the bug he found taped to the elevator wall. He held it toward her.

  She stiffened, but refused to look at it.

  “No blood, Cassandra. Not a trace. Which means you never implanted it like you were supposed to.”

  A hard edge sharpened her face.

  “The computer code?”

  She simply stared at him, coldly dispassionate now. “You know I can’t.”

  He searched this stranger’s face for the partner he knew, but she was long gone. There was no remorse, no guilt, only determination. He didn’t have the time or the stomach to break her. He nodded to Fenton. “Have your men cuff her. Keep her under constant guard.”

  As she was being secured, she called over to him. Her words were plainly spoken. “Painter, you’d best watch your back. You have no idea what a shitload of pain you just stepped into.”

  He picked up the computer suitcase and walked away.

  “You’re swimmin’ in the deep end, Painter. And there are goddamn sharks all around you, circling and circling.”

  He ignored her and crossed toward the north entrance. He had to admit something to himself: he simply didn’t understand women.

  Before he could escape back inside, a tall figure in a sheriff’s hat blocked his way. It was one of the MP Tribal Police. “Commander Crowe?”

  “Yes?”

  “We have an urgent call dispatched through our offices holding for you.”

  His brow crinkled. “Who from?”

  “From an Admiral Rector, sir. You can speak to him on one of our radios.”

  Painter frowned. Admiral Tony “The Tiger” Rector was the director of DARPA, his commander in chief. Painter had never spoken to him, only seen his name on memos a
nd letters. Had word already reached Washington about the mess out here?

  He allowed himself to be led to one of the parked gray cars, lights still flashing atop it. He accepted the radio. “Commander Crowe here. How may I help you, sir?”

  “Commander, we need you back in Arlington immediately. There’s a helicopter on its way to collect you.”

  As if on cue, the bell beat of a helicopter sounded in the distance.

  Admiral Rector continued, “You’ll be relieved by Commander Giles. Debrief him on the current state of your operation, then report here as soon as you land at Dulles. There’ll be a car waiting for you.”

  “Yes, sir,” he responded, but the connection was already dead.

  He stepped out of the car and stared at the gray-green helicopter sailing over the surrounding woodlands, the lands of his ancestors. A sense of misgiving rang through him, what his father called “distrust of the white eyes.” Why had Admiral Rector called him so abruptly? What was the urgency? He couldn’t help but hear an echo of Cassandra’s words.

  You’re swimmin’ in the deep end, Painter…and there are goddamn sharks all around you, circling and circling.

  3

  Matters of the Heart

  NOVEMBER 14, 05:05 P.M. GMT

  LONDON, ENGLAND

  OVER HERE! I found something!”

  Safia turned to see one of the men armed with a metal detector call to his partner. What now? The pair had been turning up bits of bronze statuary, iron incense burners, and copper coins. Safia splashed over to see what had been discovered. It might be significant.

  Across the gallery, Kara appeared at the entrance to the wing, having heard the shout, too. She joined them.

  “What have you found?” she asked with cold authority.

  “I’m not sure,” the man said with a nod to his detector. “But I’m getting a very strong reading.”

  “A piece of the meteorite?”

  “Can’t tell. It’s under this block of stone.”

  Safia saw that the block had once been the torso and lower limbs of a sandstone statue, toppled onto its back. Despite the fact that the upper limbs and head had been blasted away, she recognized the figure. The life-size statue had once stood guard by a tomb in Salalah. It dated to 200B.C It depicted a man with an elongated object lifted to his shoulder. Some thought it looked like a rifle, but actually it was a funerary incense lamp, borne on the shoulder.

  The destruction of the statue was a tragic loss. All that remained now were the torso and two broken legs. Even these were so blasted by the heat that the sandstone had melted and hardened into a crust of glass over its surface.

  By now, others of Kara’s red-hatted forensic team gathered around them.

  The man who made the discovery pointed his metal detector at the ruined statue. “We’ll have to roll the block out of the way. See what’s under it.”

  “Do it,” Kara said with a nod. “We’ll need crowbars.”

  A pair of men slogged away toward the stash of work tools.

  Safia stepped protectively forward. “Kara, wait. Don’t you recognize this statue?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look closer. This is the statue your father discovered. The one found buried by that tomb in Salalah. We need to preserve what we can.”

  “I don’t care.” Kara pulled her aside by the elbow. “What’s important is that there could be a clue to what happened to my father under there.”

  Safia tried to pull her aside, keeping her voice low. “Kara…you can’t really think anything of this has to do with your father’s death?”

  Kara waved to the men with the crowbars. “Give me one of those.”

  Safia remained where she was. Her gaze swept around the other rooms of the gallery, contemplating it all in a new light. All her work, the collection, the years spent in study…was it more than just a memorial to Reginald Kensington for Kara? Had it also been a quest? To gather research material all in one place, to determine what actually happened to her father out in the desert so long ago.

  Safia remembered the story from when they were both girls, told amid much weeping. Kara had been convinced something supernatural had killed her father. Safia knew the details.

  The nisnases…the ghosts of the deep desert.

  Even as girls, she and Kara had investigated these tales, learning all they could about the mythology of the nisnases. Legend said they were all that remained of a people that once inhabited a vast city in the desert. It went by many names: Iram, Wabar, Ubar. The City of a Thousand Pillars. Mentions of its downfall could be found in the Koran, in the tales of The Arabian Nights, and among the Alexander Books. Founded by the great-grandchildren of the biblical Noah, Ubar was a rich and decadent city, filled with wicked people who dabbled in dark practices. Its king defied the warnings of a prophet named Hud, and God smote the city, driving it into the sands, never to be seen again, becoming a veritable Atlantis of the deserts. Afterward, tales persisted that the city still remained under the sands, haunted by the dead, its citizens frozen into stone, its fringes plagued by evil djinns and the even nastier nisnases, savage creatures of magical powers.

  Safia had thought Kara had set aside such myths as mere fables. Especially when investigators had attributed her father’s death to the sudden opening of a sinkhole in the desert. Such death traps appeared not uncommonly in the region, swallowing lone trucks or the unwary wanderer. The bedrock below the desert was mostly limestone, a porous rock pocked by caverns worn by the receding water table. Collapses of these caverns occurred regularly, often accompanied by the exact phenomenon described by Kara: a thick, roiling column of dust above a whirlpool of swirling sand.

  A few steps away, Kara grabbed one of the crowbars, meaning to add her own shoulder to the effort. It seemed she had not been convinced by those earlier geologists’ explanation.

  Safia should have guessed as much, especially with Kara’s dogged persistence about ancient Arabia, using her billions to delve into the past, to gather artifacts from all ages, to hire the best people, including Safia.

  She closed her eyes, wondering now how much of her own life had been guided by this fruitless quest. How influential had Kara been in her choice of studies? In her research projects here? She shook her head. It was too much to grasp at the moment. She would sort the matter later.

  She opened her eyes and stepped toward the statue, blocking the others. “I can’t let you do this.”

  Kara motioned her aside, her voice calm and logical. “If there’s a piece of the meteorite here, salvaging it is more important than a few scratches on a broken statue.”

  “Important for whom?” Safia attempted to match Kara’s stolid demeanor, but her question came off more as an accusation. “This statue is one of only a handful from that age in Arabia. Even broken, it’s priceless.”

  “The meteorite-”

  “-can wait,” Safia said, cutting off her benefactor. “At least until the sculpture can be moved safely.”

  Kara fixed her with a steely gaze that broke most men. Safia withstood the challenge, having known the girl behind the woman.

  Safia stepped toward her. She took the crowbar, surprised to feel the tremble in the other’s fingers. “I know what you were hoping,” she whispered. Both knew the history of the camel-shaped meteorite, of the British explorer who had discovered it, how it was supposed to guard the entrance to a lost city buried under the sands.

  A city named Ubar.

  And now it had exploded under most strange circumstances.

  “There must be some connection,” Kara mumbled, repeating her words from a moment ago.

  Safia knew one way to dispel such a hope. “You know that Ubar has already been found.” She let these words sink in.

  In 1992, the legendary city had been discovered by Nicolas Clapp, an amateur archaeologist, using satellite ground-penetrating radar. Founded around 900B.C and located at one of the few watering holes, the ancient city had been an important trading
post on the Incense Road, linking the frankincense groves of the coastal Omani Mountains to the markets of the rich cities of the north. Over the centuries, Ubar had prospered and grown larger. Until one day, half the city collapsed into a giant sinkhole and was abandoned to the sands by the superstitious townfolk.

  “It was only an ordinary trading post,” she continued.

  Kara shook her head, but Safia was unsure if she was negating her last statement or resigning herself to the reality. Safia remembered Kara’s excitement upon hearing of Clapp’s discovery. It had been heralded in newspapers around the globe:FABLED LOST ARABIAN CITY FOUND! She had rushed out herself to see the site, to help in the early excavation. But as Safia had stated, after two years of digging up potsherds and a few utensils, the site turned out to be nothing more exciting than an abandoned trading post.

  No vast treasures, no thousand pillars, no black ghosts…all that was left were those painful memories that haunted the living.

  “Lady Kensington,” the man with the metal detector called out again. “Maybe Dr. al-Maaz was right about not moving this bloody thing.”

  Both women turned their attention back to the toppled statue. It was now flanked by both of the team members with detectors. They held their devices to either side of the blocky torso. Both metal detectors were beeping in chorus.

  “I was wrong,” the first man continued. “Whatever I detected is not under the stone.”

  “Then where is it?” Kara asked irritably.

  The other man answered, “It’s inside it.”

  A stunned moment of silence followed until Kara broke it. “Inside?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry. I should’ve thought to triangulate earlier. But I never thought anything could be inside the stone.”

  Safia stepped forward. “It’s probably just some random iron deposits.”

  “Not from the readings we’re getting here. It’s a strong signal.”

  “We’ll have to break it open,” Kara said.

  Safia frowned at her. Bloody hell. She dropped to her knees beside the sculpture, soaking her pants. “I need a flashlight.”