The Judas Strain - James Rollins [175]
Gray entered the chamber behind Nasser and gaped at the sight.
The walls were covered in white powder, but the change was dramatic. The four bodhisattva faces looked like someone had melted their features away. What once had been beatific visages were now ruins of slag. The floors were equally scoured, as if someone had taken a sandblaster to them.
The altar in the center, lit from above, was a cracked ruin. One corner section had fallen through into a lower chamber.
Some space was definitely under there.
Most of the slab still held.
Another demolition-team member stepped into the chamber, bearing aloft a sledge. Nasser signaled him forward. Another man followed, dragging a jackhammer.
Just in case.
The first man swung his sledge, smashing square in the center. Fiery sparks blasted out from around the hammer’s head, and the great mass of sandstone gave way.
The altar tumbled into the pit.
10:20 A.M.
SUSAN SCREAMED, ARCHING up out of the backseat.
Lisa, strapped in the copilot’s seat, jarred around. She had been staring down at the expanse of the great inland lake as the Sea Dart circled, readying to land. Below, a floating village drifted from the shoreline, a tangled accumulation of Vietnamese junks and houseboats.
It was where Painter had told her to go into hiding. The fishing village lay twenty miles from Angkor. Out of harm’s way.
Lisa fumbled with her seat harness as Susan wailed. Freeing herself, she stumbled to the back of the plane.
Susan thrashed out of the fire blanket, gasping. “Too late! We’re too late!”
Lisa gathered the blanket and urged her to lie down. She had been sleeping quietly for the whole ride here. What had happened?
Susan clawed out a hand and grabbed Lisa’s forearm. The grip seared her skin, burning away the fine hairs.
Lisa yanked her arm away. “Susan, what’s wrong?”
Susan pulled herself up in the seat. The wildness in her eyes ebbed slightly, but she continued to quake all over. She swallowed hard.
“We must get there.” She mumbled her usual mantra.
“We’re landing now,” Lisa said, trying to calm her. She even felt the Sea Dart bank downward.
“No!” Susan reached again for her, but then withdrew her hand, noting Lisa shying away. Her fingers curled and slipped back under the fire blanket. She took a shuddering breath. Her eyes rose to Lisa’s. “We’re too far. Lisa, I know how this sounds. But we have only minutes left. Ten or fifteen at most.”
“Left for what?”
Lisa remembered her earlier conversation with Painter, about the Christmas Island crabs, about chemically induced neurological changes, triggering manic migratory urges. But in the sophisticated mind of a human, what did those same chemicals do? What other changes were wrought? Could Susan’s urges be trusted?
“If I don’t get there…” Susan said, shaking her head as if trying to jar a memory loose. “They’ve opened something. I can feel the sunlight. Like fiery eyes burning into me. All I know…and I know it in my bones…if I’m not there in time, there will be no cure.”
Lisa hesitated, glancing back to Ryder.
The lake rose up as the Sea Dart swept downward.
Susan moaned. “I didn’t ask for this.”
Lisa heard the grief in her words, sensing that the pain encompassed more than the biological burden. Susan had lost her husband, her world.
She turned back to the woman.
Susan’s face shone with a blur of emotions: fear, grief, desperation, and a deep loneliness.
Susan placed her palms together. “I’m not a crab. Can’t you see that?”
Lisa did.
She swung around and called to Ryder. “Pull up!”
“What?” Ryder glanced back.
Lisa motioned her thumb in the air. “Don’t land! We have to get closer to the ruins.” She clambered up and used the seat backs to pull herself up to the copilot seat. “There’s a river that runs through the town of Siem Reap.”
She sank into the seat. She had studied the navigational maps of the region. The town still lay six miles or so away. She remembered Susan’s warning.
Ten or fifteen minutes at most.
Would that be close enough? Her own blood was now ignited