strength to raise a hand to wipe it away.
Two lights left. One. Then that too winked out. The cabin was black, silent apart from his own labored breathing and the occasional creaks from the damaged viewport. With the sub now stationary, the strain on the acrylic hemisphere appeared to have eased, but he knew that on a microscopic level the immense pressure of the water outside was still relentlessly attacking the cracks.
Crushed into oblivion in a heartbeat, or slipping into unconsciousness and suffocation: Either way, he wouldn’t know about it. He was about to close his leaden eyes to await fate’s decision … when he realized that the darkness was receding.
But that was impossible. There was no light down here—
Matt was suddenly dazzled as brilliant beams swept into the cabin. Was he hallucinating—or were the stories of seeing bright light at the moment of death true? Were angels coming for him? But then a sharp jolt told him that he was still alive and lucid. Another vessel had just made contact with his submersible.
A big vessel, he saw as the spotlights went out, replaced by softer illumination from the other craft’s interior. The Sharkdozer had been scooped up by the larger sub—and the ticking of a backup mechanical depth gauge revealed it was still ascending. What should have been a simple calculation took several seconds in his befuddled state, but if it continued upward at the same rate, he would be on the surface in a matter of minutes.
Even if he passed out from carbon dioxide poisoning, he could still be saved.
But who were his saviors?
The answer came as his vision adjusted to the light. The Sharkdozer was on the foredeck of a luxury submarine, its steeply raked bridge directly ahead of him. Two blurry figures came into focus through its windows, one stocky and balding, the other slimmer and red-haired. They waved at him.
Somehow, he found the energy to return the gesture. “Guess I’m not dead,” the Australian gasped, with a feeble smile. “No way are they angels …”
TWENTY-SEVEN
New York City
The case containing the three statuettes sat open on Nina’s office desk. Eddie lifted one of the trio from the protective foam bed, dancing it between its companions as if playing with a toy soldier. “Hard to believe these crappy little things caused so much trouble.”
“And cost so many lives,” said Nina morosely. After Glas had returned them to the survey ship—its crew astonished by the sight of the huge submarine emerging from the depths alongside them—Matt had been flown to a hospital in Portugal, but it would be weeks before an attempt to retrieve the bodies of Hayter and the others aboard the destroyed submersible could be made … if there was even anything left to recover. “But they might cost a whole lot more.”
“Right now, the lives I’m most bothered about are ours. I don’t trust Glas—he still might decide that the easiest thing to do would be take out them and you in one go. I’m sure Sophia’ll have suggested it.” He surveyed the buildings on the western side of First Avenue with suspicion, half-expecting to see someone aiming a rocket launcher at them from a window.
“I don’t trust Glas either. But I definitely don’t trust Warden. Evil billionaire with Sophia on one side, evil billionaire with Stikes on the other. It’s like being caught between …”
“Two big piles of shit?”
“I was going to say Scylla and Charybdis, but yours works too. Even if it’s kind of gross.”
“Why can’t we ever meet any nice billionaires?” Eddie tapped the figurine against one of its companions. “So, we’re finally going to smash these little buggers, then?”
Nina took the statue from him, turning it over in her hands. Had the blinds been closed, she knew, her touch would have produced a brief and faint earth energy reaction, but New York was too far from any of the mysterious natural lines of power to produce an effect visible in daylight. “I wish we didn’t have to,” she said, sighing. “They’re another link to Atlantis, maybe to something even older. For all we know, they might have been made by some earlier civilization. We know the Veteres were able to use earth energy.”
“Yeah, and it almost killed us,” Eddie complained. The race that had walked the earth before humans was long gone, but the ancient booby traps it left to protect its secrets had still been active. “Nothing good’s ever come out of it. And it can only get worse if