It was heading west in the early dark of night. Back toward the mountains, back toward Vilcafor.
Doogie sat up front in the cockpit, flying the plane, while Van Lewen, Race, Renee and the wounded Uli sat in the back.
Race pondered his escape from the control booth.
In the five seconds he'd had between disarming the Supernova and the mixing of the hypergolic fuels, he had desperately searched the cabin for a way out.
As it happened, his eyes fell upon one of the warhead capsules—a container capable of withstanding 10,000 pounds-per-square-inch of pressure since its purpose was th.e protection of explosive nuclear warheads.
With nothing else to call on, he'd dived for it—snatching the idol sitting on the workbench on the way and snapping shut the capsule's lid just as the five-second countdown expired.
The fuels mixed and the control booth blew and he was launched high into the sky, inside the capsule. Thankfully, it had landed relatively softly in the trees surrounding the mine.
But he was alive and that was all that mattered.
Now, as he sat in his seat in the back of the seaplane, Race also held in his hands a tattered leather-bound book that he had found in the boat-house after his spectacular escape. It had been sitting on a shelf inside the office overlooking the mine.
It was a book that he'd insisted on searching for before they headed back to Vilcafor.
It was the Santiago Manuscript.
The original Santiago Manuscript—written by Alberto Santiago in the sixteenth centur stolen from the San Sebas tian Abbey by Heinrich Anistaze in the twentieth, and copied by Special Agent Uli Pieck of the Bundes Kriminal Amt not long after that.
As he sat in the back of the little seaplane, Race gazed at the manuscript in a kind of subdued awe.
He saw Alberto Santiago's handwriting. The strokes and flourishes were familiar, but now he saw them on beauti fully textured paper and written in rich blue ink, not some harsh, scratchy photocopy.
He wanted to read it immediately, but no, that would have
to wait. There were some other things he had to settle first.
'Van Lewen,' he said.
'Yes.'
'Tell me about Frank Nash.”
'What?'
'I said, tell me about Frank Nash.'
'What do you want to know?'
'Have you worked with him before?'
'No. This is my first time. My unit was pulled out of Bragg to come on this mission.'
'Are you aware that Nash is a colonel in the Army's Special Projects Unit?“
'Yeah, sure.'
'So you knew it was a lie when Nash came to my office yesterday morning with a DARPA ID and a story saying that he was a retired Army colonel now working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency?'
'I didn't know he said that.'
'You didn't know?'
Van Lewen looked at Race honestly. 'Professor Race, I'm just a grunt, okay. I was told that this was to be a protective assignment. I was told to protect you. So that's what I'm doing. If Colonel Nash lied to you, I'm sorry but I didn't know.'
Race clenched his teeth. He was pissed as hell. He was furious at having been tricked into coming along on the mission.
In addition to being angry, however, he was also determined to know everything, for if Nash wasn't really with DARPA then it raised a whole lot of other questions. For instance, what about Lauren and Copeland? Were they with Army Special Projects, too?
Even closer to home were the questions regarding how Race himself had come to be a part of the mission. After all, Nash had claimed to have been put onto him by his brother Marty. But Race hadn't even seen his brother in almost ten years.
Strangely, Race found himself thinking about Marty.
They'd been close as kids. Although Marty had been a good three years older than him, they had always played together— football, baseball, just plain running around. But Will had always been better at sports, despite the age difference.
Marty, on the other hand, was easily the cleverer of the two boys. He'd excelled at school and been ostracised for it.
He wasn't handsome, and even as a nine-year-old he was the image of his father, all hunched shoulders and thick dark eyebrows, with a permanently severe expression that was reminiscent of Richard Nixon.
Conversely, Race had his mother's easy good looks— sandy brown hair and sky blue eyes.
