James Rollins - THE DEVIL COLONY

"Doesn't sound like they were scared," Jordan said. "More like they were hiding something."

Hank touched his nose- dead on, my boy -then pointed to the screen. "Look at this. I found this passage in a recent study; it's an excerpt from an old journal of one of the earliest settlers, John Hamilcar Hollister. I could find nothing like this anywhere else, but it speaks volumes on that deep Indian silence."

Jordan leaned closer.

Hank read the words quietly again alongside him.

There are but few Indian legends which refer to this purposely unknown land. Of these I have found but one, and that is this-that no white man should ever be told of this inferno, lest he should enter that region and form a league with the devils, and by their aid come forth and destroy all Indians.

Jordan sat back, stunned. "So they were hiding something."

"Something our ancestors didn't want to have fall into the wrong hands, fearing it would be used against them."

"That lost city must be there."

But where?

Hank checked his watch, fighting against a return of the paralyzing despair that had gripped him moments before. He would follow Jordan's example. He would not give up hope. He caught the young man staring out the window toward the lights of Flagstaff in the distance. But Hank knew his mind was much farther away, with a worry that had nothing to do with volcanoes and lost cities.

This time it was Hank who reached over and gave Jordan's hand a squeeze of reassurance. "We'll get her back."

1:38 A.M.

Salt Lake City, Utah

It had been almost an hour since Kai had spoken to Uncle Crowe. She sat in a dining room chair, unbound, but there was nothing she could do, except chew at her thumbnail.

The suite of rooms bustled with activity. Commandos had shed combat gear for civilian clothing that looked ill-suited to such hardened mercenaries. They set about packing, storing gear, breaking down weapons. They were readying to move out.

Even the computer equipment had been racked up inside a tall, wheeled cargo case, modified out of a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk. From the stack, several lines of cable trailed back to Jordan's gutted cell phone.

Rafael paced around the container, waiting for Kai's uncle's call.

She lowered her hand to her lap, clasping her palms between her legs, just as anxious as the man who kept her prisoner, balancing on a razor of terror.

Before Painter's call, convinced he was dead, she had been locked in one of the bedrooms of the suite. At the time she knew these people were going to kill her. She didn't care. Drained to a hollow shell of herself, she had simply sat on the bed's edge. She was still aware of feeling fear, coiled around the base of her spine, but it was nothing compared to the feeling of desolation that gripped her. She had seen too much blood, too much death. Her own life held little meaning. She considered breaking the mirror in the bathroom and using a shard of glass to spill her own blood, as if by so doing she could wrest back some modicum of control.

But even that had felt too much like fighting.

She simply didn't have the strength.

Then the call had come. Her uncle was alive, so were the professor and Jordan, and even that walking refrigerator called Kowalski. She'd seen their picture on Rafael's computer screen, some frozen image from a broadcast of the group's rescue.

After the call, jubilation filled those hollow spaces inside her, shining a warm light into that dark vacuum. Her uncle's last words stayed with her.

I'm going to come get you. I promise.

He'd said he would not abandon her-and she believed him, which is what ignited the keening terror inside her now. She suddenly wanted to live, and in allowing herself to feel that desire, she realized that once again she had everything to lose.

But there was no escape.

She glanced over to her sole companion at the dining room table. It was the muscular African woman named Ashanda. Kai had initially been terrified of the woman, but then, at the time, the woman had been heating irons in the fire, carrying out a torture upon Rafael's orders. But over time, that fear mellowed into something that resembled discomfort mixed with a kind of curiosity.

Who was she?

The woman was so unlike the others, clearly not a soldier, though she fought for Rafael. Kai pictured Ashanda rising from the shadows of the mud-heated cavern, running with a lithe speed that defied her size. Kai had also seen Ashanda working at the computer as she herself talked to Painter, the woman's dark fingers racing over a keyboard. It was clear that she was more than a technician.

In the bright light of the room, Kai noted vague scars thickening the woman's skin, forming rows of small dots that made stripes along her arms, looking almost like the skin of a crocodile. Her face was similarly scarred but in a more decorative pattern, one that accentuated her dark eyes and swept in wings to her temples. Her hair was done in tight, dark braids that spread from the crown of her head and draped gracefully to her forehead and shoulders.

Kai watched the woman staring at Rafael. Before she had seen only emptiness in those eyes, but this was no longer true. Deep within those dark mirrors, Kai knew, stirred a well of sadness. Ashanda sat so very still, as if afraid of being seen, yet at the same time, wanting more. There was devotion in that gaze, too, along with weariness. She sat like a dog waiting for a touch from its master, knowing that a mere touch was all she was ever going to get.

The reverie ended with the chiming ring of a phone.

Kai swung around.

At last .

1:44 A.M.

Rafael appreciated punctuality. The director of Sigma had placed his follow-up call precisely at the time he had promised. It was not the call itself, but what the man offered when he spoke, that dismayed the Frenchman, coming as it did so unexpectedly.

"A truce?" Rafe asked. "Between us? How does that serve me?"

Painter's voice remained urgent. "As promised, I'll tell you where the Fourteenth Colony is located. But it will do you no good. The cache is set to explode in approximately four and a half hours."

"Then, Monsieur Crowe, if you wish your niece to live, you'd best make this exchange as quickly as possible."

"Listen to me, Rafael. I'll tell you the location now . The Fourteenth Colony is hidden somewhere in Yellowstone National Park. I'm sure that such a resting place makes sense to you, does it not?"

Rafe fought to understand such a drastic turn of events.

Is this a ruse? To what end?

Painter did not let up, speaking rapidly. "Give me an e-mail address. I'll send you all the relevant data. But in a few short hours, that cache is going to go critical, triggering a blast over a hundredfold stronger than the one in Iceland. But you know that's not the true danger. That explosion will release a mass of nanobots. They'll start disassembling any matter they encounter and keep spreading and growing larger. The nano-nest will eat its way down until it reaches the magma chamber under Yellowstone, where it will ignite the supervolcano buried beneath that park. The resulting cataclysm will be the equivalent of a mile-wide asteroid slamming into the earth. It means the end of most life, certainly all human life."

Rafe found himself breathing harder. Could he be telling the truth?

"I doubt that such destruction will serve even your aims," Painter continued. "Or those of anyone you work with, for that matter. We either team up, share our knowledge, in order to stop this from happening, or it's the end of everything."

"I... I will need time to think about this." Rafe hated to hear the stammer in his own voice.

"Don't take long," Painter warned. "Again I will send you all of our data-whatever you want. But Yellowstone is spread over two million acres, and this creates a huge challenge to us. We must still discover and pinpoint the lost city's exact location, and we must do it while the clock keeps ticking downward."