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“I do.” Nicholas leaned down, now face-to-face with Kohath. “Must you do this yourself?”
Jason blinked.
Nicholas lifted Jason in his arms and carried him to the console. “Mike, Amos, go. Hurry. Find Kitsune and Grant, all of you get to the boat. Watch out for Cassandra. I’ll be right behind you.”
Amos didn’t want to leave Jason, but Mike grabbed him by the collar and dragged him out.
Nicholas eased the old man down in the chair, gently laid his hand on the biometric reader. He saw it was designed specifically to measure a heartbeat beneath the palm. A dead man’s hand wouldn’t work.
He pressed his own hand over Jason’s, helped him flatten his palm on the reader.
The screen in front of them whirred to life, and a protocol began running that Nicholas could barely follow. The language was incredibly complex, the coding sophisticated beyond anything Nicholas had ever seen, had ever even conceived of. Nicholas gently laid Jason’s fingers on the keyboard, helped him press two keys, a J and a G, no more, only two keys.
He watched in astonishment as the giant spinning cloud hovering near Washington, D.C., grew smaller and slower until it broke apart and gradually faded away, disappeared into nothingness. It was incredible, unbelievable, and he knew he would never understand how it worked. The storm that would have destroyed Washington had simply vanished, as if it had been sucked up in a vacuum and all with two key strokes. And he realized that was it exactly, the storm had been funneled away. There would be no incredible winds, no massive storm surge. Without the energy to keep it running, it would slow and dissipate as well.
Nicholas pulled a thumb drive from his key ring and showed it to Kohath. “It would be a travesty to lose all your work. May I have this coding?”
Kohath blinked his eyes again, then whispered, “Not the twins, never the twins.”
He didn’t tell Kohath that he’d killed his grandson, that his granddaughter was insane and he didn’t know where she was. “No, don’t worry, the twins won’t get it.” Nicholas slid the thumb drive into a slot. It only took a moment to transfer, and that was amazing. He’d never seen code work so fast. He slipped the thumb drive back onto his key ring.
Jason’s hand slipped from the console and Nicholas caught it, pressed his palm back onto the pad.
“Help me destroy this.” He flipped open the second stage reader, and leaned Jason forward. He held Jason’s head still, and with a great effort, Jason opened his eyes. He rested his head against the plastic, waited for the biometric reader to take full measure of his iris.
There was a click. The two forms of identification were registered, accepted. Jason Kohath’s head slumped forward, and Nicholas knew he was dead. Still, Nicholas checked for a pulse, found nothing. He felt both anger and loss for this man he would never know, a genius responsible for great destruction and death and greater sacrifice.
Nicholas hit Command X on the computer keyboard.
The room began to shake.
CHAPTER EIGHTY
The huge wall screens began to crack one after the other, shattering glass flying everywhere. The floor was suddenly moving, thick slabs roiling upward at crazy angles. Nicholas tried to leap over the steepening slabs, but it was too late. He lost his footing and went down, rolling toward a huge chasm that split open the floor. He grabbed a corner of the console, managed to drag himself upward. The floor shuddered again and swelled and heaved and split apart. There was nowhere to go, every direction blocked by metal and glass and huge chasms in the floor.
The temperature spiked and he saw lava begin to bubble up through the cracks and widening crevasses. The room was steaming, thick jets of hot air rising all around him and he couldn’t see, could only go by the faint sound he heard over the eruption. Was it Mike? He didn’t know.
He had to get out of this inferno or he would die.
He staggered to another shattered console, hoping to get out that way, but a huge jagged rock cut through the control center itself. He realized this wasn’t a dormant volcano magically come to life, no, Jason Kohath had built his control center on top of an active volcano and he’d managed to contain it, but no longer. Now it was free and it would destroy the island.
He tried to get around a huge shaft of boiling hot rock, but a table blocked him. It fell into one of the huge splits in the floor.
He was stuck in the center of the room, Jason Kohath’s body on fire at his feet, his grandson stretched out ten feet away, the body sliding toward a canyon of glass and molten rock, clothes burning.
Nicholas didn’t want to die with the Kohaths, but he was choking, the steam from the lava burning his hands, his skin—
And then Mike was there, in the room, he could hear her now shouting at him above the din and through the steam and the billowing lava. Where was she?
“Up,” she was screaming. “Nicholas, look up!”
And he saw Kitsune on the catwalk twenty feet above his head, the lava making her hair glow red.
A catwalk he hadn’t noticed before. He couldn’t go across, but he could go up.
Without hesitation he leaped up on the table that was sliding inexorably toward a gaping hole in the center of the room, gathered himself and leaped as high as he could. His hand grabbed around the bottom rung of the railing just as the desk slid into the pit and sank out of sight. The floor around it disappeared into the widening pit, lava bubbling high, swallowing everything. The whole room was shaking now, shuddering, and the railing swung wildly and he knew he was losing his grip. He tried to catch the railing with his right hand, but his hand slipped. He looked down to see the control center disappear into the red gaping mouth to be burned away by the molten fire. No way was he going to fall in that pit. He hung there for a second, legs dangling over bubbling lava, and the metal railing was heating up, his hands burning. He couldn’t die, he couldn’t leave Mike.
Then he heard Kitsune’s voice, yelling, “Give me your hand, Nicholas! Hurry!”
