James Rollins - THE DEVIL COLONY

Painter turned to Denton.

"Like the dagger, I examined one of the plates under the electron microscope. While the tablets appear gold in color, the metal is harder than it should be. Much harder. Normally, gold is a relatively soft, pliable metal, but these tablets are as hard as gemstones. Microscopic analysis of the metal revealed an unusually dense atomic structure, made up of macromolecular structures of gold atoms fitted tightly together like a jigsaw puzzle. And the whole matrix seems to be held in place by the same cementite nanowires found in the dagger." He shook his head. "I've never seen anything like it. Their value is incalculable."

"And apparently worth killing for," Painter added.

With those words, the lights suddenly went out. Everyone froze, holding their breaths. A few battery-powered emergency signs glowed from the hallway, but cast little light into the laboratory. A low canine growl rose from underneath the table, raising the hairs on Painter's arms. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he spotted a stocky, shadowy shape slip around the foot of Kanosh's chair, keeping guard.

"Hush, Kawtch," the professor warned in a soft voice. "It's all right, boy."

Kowalski let out a loud huff. "Sorry, Doc. But this time I think you should be listening to your dog. There ain't nothing right about any of this."

Kai crept from her own seat and circled to stand in Painter's shadow. He reached back and took hold of her wrist. Under his fingertips, he felt her pulse quicken as something loud crashed off in the direction of the stairwell, echoing down the corridors.

The dog, Kawtch, growled again.

Painter whispered to the physics professor. "Is there another way out of here? An emergency exit."

"No," came his hushed, scared response. "The lab is underground for a reason. All exits are by the stairwell and lead up to the main building."

So we're trapped.

May 31, 1:12 A.M.

Takoma Park, Maryland

"Take the next left," Gray instructed the cabdriver.

To Seichan, Gray's anxiety was plain to read. After getting that frantic call from his mother, he remained wound up tight.

Leaning forward from the back and pointing with an outthrust arm, he looked like he wanted to climb over the seat and take the wheel himself. His other hand still clutched his cell phone. He'd tried calling his parents' house several times during the ride from D.C. out to the Maryland suburbs, but there had been no answer, which only set him further on edge.

"Turn on Cedar," he ordered. "It's faster."

As he perched on the edge of his seat, Seichan stared out the window. The taxi sidled past the Takoma Park library and swung into a shadowy maze of narrow streets lined by small Queen Anne-style cottages and stately Victorians. A heavy canopy of oaks and maples turned the roads into leafy tunnels, whose bowers muffled the glow of the occasional streetlamp.

She watched the dark houses and tried to imagine the lives of the people inside, but such an existence was foreign to her. She remembered little of her own childhood in Vietnam. She had no memory of her father, and what she remembered of her mother she wished she could forget: of being ripped from her arms, of her mother being dragged out a door, bloody-faced and screaming, by men in military uniforms. Afterward, Seichan spent her childhood in a series of squalid orphanages, half starved most of the time, maltreated the rest.

These quiet homes with their happy lives held no meaning for her.

At last, the taxi turned onto Butternut Avenue. Seichan had been to the home of Gray's parents only once. At the time she'd been shot and fleeing toward the only man she could trust. She glanced over to Gray. It had been almost three months since she'd been this close to him. His face, if anything, had grown more gaunt, his features detailed in harsher lines, softened only by full lips. She remembered kissing those same lips once, in a moment of weakness. There had been no tenderness behind the act, only desperation and need. Even now, she remembered the heat, the roughness of his bearded stubble, the hardness of his hold on her. But like the quiet homes here, such a life was not for her.

Besides, the last she knew, he was still casually and intermittently involved with a lieutenant in the Italian carabiniere. At least, that was the case months ago.

Gray's eyes suddenly pinched in worry, revealing the deep-set creases at the corners. She faced forward. The street was as dark as the others in the neighborhood, but ahead, a small Craftsman bungalow with a wide porch and overhanging gable blazed with light, every window aglow. No one was sleeping there.

"That's the house," Gray instructed the driver.

Even before the cab pulled to a full stop, he was out the door, tossing a fistful of bills at the driver. Seichan met the cabbie's eyes in the rearview mirror. He looked ready to respond harshly at such rude treatment, but she stared him down, silencing him. She held out a palm.

"Change."

She left him a small tip, pocketed the rest, and climbed out.

She followed Gray as he hurried across the street, but his goal was not the front porch. To the side of the house, a narrow driveway stretched to a single-car garage in the back. The roll-up door was open, lights on, revealing two slight figures silhouetted in that glow. No wonder no one had answered the house phone.

Gray stalked quickly down the driveway.

As Seichan drew near the open garage, she heard the whining sound of a saw motor, the bite of steel into wood, smelled the cedar scent of sawdust.

"Jack, you're going to wake the entire neighborhood," a woman begged plaintively. "Shut things down and come back to bed."

"Mom..." Gray hurried forward into the middle of the drama.

Seichan kept a few steps back, but Gray's mother still noted her with a pinch of her brows, trying to identify the stranger who accompanied her son. It had been two years since they'd last set eyes on each other. Slowly, recognition and confusion played across the older woman's face-and not unexpectedly a flash of fear.

Likewise, Seichan was shocked at how aged Gray's parents appeared, frail shadows of their former selves. His mother, her hair disheveled, was dressed in a housecoat, cinched at the waist, and slippers. His father, barefoot, wore a pair of boxers and a T-shirt, exposing his prosthetic leg, belted at the thigh.

"Harriet! Where's my sander? Why can't you goddamn stay out of my stuff?"

Gray's father was standing at a workbench, his face red with fury, his brow damp with exertion. He struggled to secure a piece of wood into a vise clamp. Behind him, a table saw idled with pieces of oak cut into haphazard sections scattered on the floor beneath it, as if he'd been trying to construct the pieces of a wooden puzzle whose solution only he knew.

Gray stepped forward and unplugged the saw, then crossed to his father and tried to gently guide him away from the workbench. An elbow lashed out, striking Gray in the face. He stumbled back.

"Jack!" his mother yelled.

His father looked around, confused. Realization seemed to sink through whatever fugue state the man was in. "I'm... I didn't mean..." He placed a palm on his forehead, as if feeling himself for a fever. He reached an arm toward Gray. "I'm sorry, Kenny."

Gray's face flinched a bit. "It's Gray, Dad. Kenny's still in California."

Seichan knew Gray had a brother, his only sibling, who ran some Internet start-up in Silicon Valley. Gray, his lip split and bleeding, approached his father more cautiously.

"Dad, it's me."

"Grayson?" He allowed his son to take his arm. Eyes, red-rimmed and exhausted, stared around the garage. A flicker of fear passed over his face. "What... where...?"