reason God would be looking out for a slimeball like Patterson is to send him to roast in hell.”
Ethan walked to the middle of the office and slowly turned 360 degrees, observing his surroundings and stopping as he looked directly at the vast crucifix dominating the wall above the altar.
He strode across to it, looking closely at the chromed surface.
The crucifix was made of three tightly fitting pieces: the central vertical pillar, the upper tip, and the horizontal crossbeam. The vertical pillar was just over six feet tall and a foot wide, and as Ethan looked at the surface he could just make out a translucency to the metal. He looked down at the carpet beneath his feet and saw a mild thinning of the fibers, as though someone had walked or stood on the same spot many times.
“Here,” he motioned for Lopez to join him.
Lopez examined the surface of the crucifix for a moment, then the carpet.
“He went through here somehow. There must be a release mechanism,” she said.
“It’s got to be something mechanical,” Ethan agreed, turning.
His eye caught instantly on the large bronze eagle on Patterson’s desk, beside a small monitor. Lopez followed his gaze even as they both heard muffled voices approaching down the corridor outside. Ethan grabbed the eagle’s head and twisted it sideways.
Silently, the vertical pillar of the crucifix revolved into the wall, revealing a narrow passage that opened into a wider descending tunnel beyond. Lopez slipped through the opening, Ethan following a moment later before the crucifix silently closed behind him. He realized that he could faintly see through the crucifix back into the office, the chrome surface some sort of two-way mirror that Patterson must have used to enter and exit the office unobserved. Figures burst into the office, torch beams sweeping this way and that.
“The FBI’s here,” he whispered. “It won’t take them long to figure out where we’ve gone.”
“We won’t need much time,” Lopez said.
The passage opened out ahead, Ethan guessing it to be about twelve meters long and descending two meters in total, enough to put it below the auditorium of the megachurch. As they descended, Ethan could make out a door with a heavy handle, and before it a gap of some six inches. Lopez stopped in front of the door, and as Ethan came alongside her he could see that the gap extended to either side of them, above and below, the door the entrance to a large boxlike structure suspended in midair within an underground chamber.
“An anechoic chamber,” Lopez said loudly. “Don’t worry, they can’t hear us and we can’t hear them until we open this door.”
Ethan shook his head in wonder, having heard only rumors about such chambers. An anechoic chamber was a form of room that was isolated from exterior sound or electromagnetic radiation sources, preventing the reflection of wave phenomena. The chamber was supported slightly above the actual floor using tensile springs, and surrounded on all sides by soundproofing layers of anechoic tiles, a concrete shield and a full six inches of near vacuum-pressure air.
“Shall we?” Ethan suggested, grabbing the door handle.
Nicola raised her pistol, and on a count of three Ethan yanked the door open and they burst into the chamber together to hear the voice of a man shouting.
“You’re insane!”
The voice sounded dead, monotone, its vocal resonance lost within the room as though Ethan were listening to it underwater. He blinked in surprise as he saw that the steel-walled room was an operating theater, replete with a heart-bypass machine, refrigerator banks, computer monitors, and a single, large light suspended over a gurney in the center of the theater. Upon the gurney, lying restrained on his back, was Senator Isaiah Black. The senator stared in terror at Ethan and Lopez.
“Get this bastard off me!”
Pastor Kelvin Patterson stood on one side of the theater. In one hand he held a syringe filled with a deep-scarlet fluid, the other hand on the door of a refrigerator filled with mysterious-looking vials. Before Ethan or Lopez could speak, Patterson lurched sideways, reaching out for the senator with the syringe.
“Freeze!” Lopez shouted, aiming at the pastor. “Don’t you dare move!”
Patterson hesitated, the needle twelve inches from the senator’s neck.
Senator Black’s face was contorted with a volatile mixture of outrage and fear.
“What the hell is in that?” he shouted, staring fanatically at the syringe.
Ethan spoke quietly, his gaze leveled at Patterson and radiating hatred.
“It’s the blood of an unknown alien species.”
Senator Black’s skin paled visibly, but Patterson snarled back